Advertise our baseline selling price to sell house quickly?

Hello all,

Just looking for some advice. We are selling our house in Galway city and hoping to move out a bit to a bigger house with a garden to accomodate our growing family. We have an offer of €240k on our house at the moment, but in order to raise the finance for the deposit on the other house we can not sell below €245k. There is no movement with the person with the offer of €240k (despite us throwing in all contents etc.) We need to move on this quickly to get the other house. We are thinking of advertising it as 'First offer of €245k will secure - no offers'. This would really be a bargain for someone as the house is a really great house in a great location. The auctioneer thinks we could hold out for more, but at the same time can see she might get her commission this way! Would you think this is a good route to get people in the door? Any other suggestions would be heartily welcomed! Thanks!

Yvonne 062 said:

Hello all,

Just looking for some advice. We are selling our house in Galway city and hoping to move out a bit to a bigger house with a garden to accomodate our growing family. We have an offer of €240k on our house at the moment, but in order to raise the finance for the deposit on the other house we can not sell below €245k. There is no movement with the person with the offer of €240k (despite us throwing in all contents etc.) We need to move on this quickly to get the other house. We are thinking of advertising it as 'First offer of €245k will secure - no offers'. This would really be a bargain for someone as the house is a really great house in a great location. The auctioneer thinks we could hold out for more, but at the same time can see she might get her commission this way! Would you think this is a good route to get people in the door? Any other suggestions would be heartily welcomed! Thanks!

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You have done very well to get any offer in the current market.
If nothing has been agreed can't you get 5k off the house you are buying?

You have done very well to get any offer in the current market.
If nothing has been agreed can't you get 5k off the house you are buying?

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Thanks for the reply - I completely understand we are lucky to have an offer at all (Lets hope its still stands if it came to the crunch!) - that's what makes it so annoying that we are so close yet so far away. We have to borrow to meet the legal and auctioneers fees and just can't afford another €5k.
We need 8% of the purchase price of the new house for the deposit - so they would have to knock nearly €60k off the purchase price to reduce the deposit by €5k if you get my drift - and that aint gonna happen I can tell ya!(we are already hoping to get a REALLY good deal).

Have you actually agreed a price for the new house yet? You do not always need to pay a 10% or 8% deposit- less can be given by agreement with the vendor. Sometimes people only pay a booking deposit and the balance is payable only on closing if finance is easier this way.

However if it is difficult to come up with a 10% deposit then you need to be sure you are capable of buying the new house at all and keeping up the repayments on a mortgage- it is often a warning bell.

Hi Vanilla,
I'm not sure what you mean about possibly being able to reduce the deposit? The bank will only give us a mortgage for 92% so surely we have to come up with the other 8%? Do you mean it may not all be payable immediately?
With regard to our trade up affordability. We won't be increasing our current mortgage by a huge amount, we could get approved for a much larger mortgage but we don't want to do that. The reason for the struggle with the deposit is we released equity a few years ago to buy a foreign property (purely investment). We are hoping to sell that too and have a really small mortgage but now is not a good time..........

As said above hard to get buyers in current market. Are you willing to lose your current bidder? If they walk where are you then? First 245k secures may cheese them off, it would me.

If you do not take this offer now you may be looking at an offer of 230K the next time or even lower. If you cannot afford to move you shouldn't be moving. Are you going to be taking on a large mortgage? Are your jobs secure? What if interest rates go up? Have you factored all this in.

Its going to take a few months for all the property transfers to go thru... would you have the 5k saved up in that much time??.. save every penny and cut back where possible.. Though if you are struggling over 5k do you really want a much bigger mortgage?

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your replies and advice. I'm not worried about being able to afford the bigger mortgage because it won't be that much bigger in all honesty. Both our jobs are secure, the company I work with has had the best 6 months it ever had! Our struggle with the deposit is due to having funds tied up in a foreign property. If we clear our current mortgage we will be clearing the mortgage on that property too though...and still only increasing the total sum owed by less that €75k. We plan to sell the foreign property (well its for sale at the minute) - worse case we'll get back what we paid for it and that will mean we will have a smaller morgage than we have at the minute. I think we are going to go back to the lady with the original offer and ask can she come up a little before adverstising again. I suppose it never occured to us to try and save the €5k because we thought we wouldn't have time as we thought all this was going to happen so quickly! As mentioned my worry is things will go down further and then we will have missed our chance altogether. I appreciate the help!

Agree with the saving plan - its going to take 3-4 months before all the paperwork is done, so you can make a huge dent in 5k in that time if you cut out essentials.

I'd bite the hand off of that 240K offer. I think its happening a lot on the current market that some sellers are obstinate on the price, declining certain offers. Reality then sets in a few months later and they end up selling for far less than the original offer if at all.
The certainty is well worth the 5K in the current market, I wouldn't let it slip through your fingers.
+1 to some hardcore saving for the next few months.