Selling Your Property - Offers

The majority of sellers need to achieve a specific price for their home in order to purchase their new property. Usually, the sale price for the property will have been set at a proportion above this, to allow room to negotiate. Negotiating can be tricky - treading the fine line between needing the maximum amount of money for the property and needing to sell it is not always easy.

If you are using an estate agent then they may have an idea of the position that potential buyers are in, and could advise you whether a higher offer might be forthcoming. Whether you accept an offer is ultimately your decision, though and if you decline one and then don’t get another - perhaps because your property is overpriced - then this is your responsibility. For this reason, you should make sure that your property is fairly priced and consider all offers. You may take as long as you like to do this - remembering that the offer could be withdrawn at any time.

The offers which are put forward will depend on market conditions. If it is a sellers market, offers could be over and above the price that you set. In a buyers market though offers will usually be 5% to 10% below the asking price. Rarely, the first person through the door will offer the asking price and the sale will go through without any problems, but this is not usually the case! When negotiating you need to hold your nerve and use any information that you have about the buyers. This is when a good relationship with the estate agent will be useful - remember you are paying their fees and they will be paid a percentage of the final price, so it is in their interests to negotiate for the best price. The ideal situation would be if someone else were to make an offer at the same time, in which case you may be able to play them off against each other.

Try to enter into a business-like relationship with anybody making an offer for your property. It is estimated that 10% of negotiations which break down are due to personality conflict. For this reason, if you do not like the buyers, you should try to separate out your feelings about them buying your pride and joy and try to keep everything civil.

Do not depend on an accepted offer resulting in a completed sale. Any number of things in the whole buying process could lead to the offer being withdrawn - from the buyers losing the sale on their property to finding something nasty during the survey. For this reason you should not take your home off the market unless you are reasonably happy that a purchase will go ahead. Don’t forget that nobody is tied to the sale until contracts are exchanged.

Although legal, gazumping is morally wrong. Unless you tell the buyer that you will consider any higher offers until contracts are exchanged, then you should not accept another offer if you have already accepted one. If you do receive a higher offer then the only morally right thing to do would be to inform everybody and at the very least give the other party a chance to raise their offer. You should be very aware that after an offer has been accepted, the buyer will have spent money on the property with conveyancing and maybe a survey, so you would be leaving them seriously out of pocket - and wary of any future purchases they embark on. Nobody likes gazumping and it should be avoided at all costs.

The buyer’s position should also be taken into consideration. The best position that a buyer can be in is to not be part of a chain. They could either be first time buyers, paying with cash, have already sold their property or be buying for investment. Not being part of a chain means that a quick completion date is more likely to be met and you are not reliant on every link. A buyer who has an agreement in principle from a mortgage company is another type who should be able to complete more easily. As well as showing a seller that the buyer is eager to complete a sale, this guarantees that the mortgage company are willing to finance the purchase subject to valuation, which will save some time with their mortgage application. So when you come to consider offers, you should not necessarily opt for the highest offer, but to take into consideration who is in the strongest position to complete a purchase.

More Selling Your Property topics below:

• Estate Agents - what can you expect from an estate agent?
• Private Sales - avoiding expensive estate agents fees
• Viewings - what you should say, what you should answer and what you should ask.
• Offers - how can you tell when an offer is the highest you will get?
• Surveys - as a seller, what can you expect from the survey?
• Legal - what is involved with conveyancing for sellers?
• Financial - what can you expect to be paying for when you sell your property?
• Selling Pack's - how the government proposes to speed up the property buying process
• Moving - what you should organise in order to have as easy a move as possible.

Apply for a Free Mortgage Quote