House buying offers?
 

We are hoping to move in the future, and having bought my house decades ago I never dealt with the new term (well new to me) of 'offers above'.

So for instance, where a house is for sale and says 'offers above £300,000', how does this work. Do they allow a certain time period with a cut off date, and accept the best offer, or just have a price in mind and when someone offers that amount accept it. Also is there a percentage of the property price that people generally require when they state 'offers above.'

I believe Scotland have different laws, but in England can an offer be accepted by the seller and then at any point before the contract is signed the seller can legally pull out?

Sounds like a ‘gazumpers’ charter! Much fairer to do it by sealed bids over £300k.

Offers above is just another selling feature. We used it mainly because we didn’t want less than the offers above figure (I.e that was the lowest we’d accept) but tbh like a lot of house purchases it depends on how popular it is, how long it’s been on etc. Nothing is to stop you making a cheeky offer, we still got offers below our asking price.

And yes you can be gazumped, until contracts are exchanged, someone can come in with a better offer and it can be accepted!

When we sold in-laws house estate agent recommended offers in excess of . That worked well, there was a bidding war and we got 50k more than base price.

Wow £50k that was a lot above the base price. I appreciate it worked for you, but I really don't like the idea of seeing properties that are within my price range and then wasting my time viewing the property that won't be local to me as I plan to move a fair distance from where I now live, and then not knowing if they will accept the base price, below it or even £50k more. Clearly the latter would be just wasting my time.

Don't take me wrong because if people were fighting over my house and wanted to offer £50k more than the base price I would be delighted.

When I bought my house, it was a matter of either paying the asking price or making an offer below it (not above it), and I wish it was still the same, but sadly not.

In the past when buying I would always discount looking at any house that was advertised as offers above. I am not interested in bidding wars, so I would just pass those one by.

It was different for us as we had time on our side. That said it sold really quickly.

That makes sense and I will will probably do the same as you and won't look at properties with 'offers above'. I guess the exception would be if it was a fair amount below our budget and what we want, then I might view it.

my current house was offers in excess of £325000 but I know the value was probably around £340000 to £350000 based on the others in the road.

It went on the market on Monday, I viewed it on the Wednesday and agreed a price of £330000 on the Friday with the agreement that it was taken off the market.

I think they wanted more but it helped that I had sold mine to first time buyers, my mortgage was sorted and they had seen a house they wanted which was empty.

If you can get a guide on what similar houses are selling for it does help but the figure advertised at shouldn't be too far away in my view.

Personally I would just ignore it. Don’t let it stop you viewing a house as there is no more or less guarantee of whether there will be a bidding war. Popular houses in sought after locations will still attract multiple buyers whatever an estate agent has encouraged the seller to put on the advert.

I have never used offers over in the ad but my agent always had instructions to reject any offer below x.