Can an estate agent refuse an offer that is "too low"?

Dav010

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118982443#Comment_118982443

Do you not think “actual worth” in advance of sale price is as subjective as the asking price? Or do you think what a bidder thinks it should be worth equates to the actual worth?

I would have thought that the price it actually sells for the the “worth” the market puts on a property.

sydthebeat

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118982443#Comment_118982443

the value of a property ie "what its worth" is the amount someone is willing to pay for it.

if the seller wants to get the asking price, and a purchaser thinks its too high, then the purchaser doesnt purchase at that time.

miamee

If it has been on the market for a while a bid slightly under the asking price might be accepted. We bought a house in February this last year, sale agreed in November. We went to see it although the asking price was above what we wanted to spend, I had a chat with the guy showing it, I knew it'd been on the market a while - since Aug. Asked about other offers, none at the time just one previous that was refused. That one was for €29k below asking. So we figured we'd improve on that and put in a bid at €19k below asking and it was accepted. We actually though it would be turned down but would get an idea of what they might accept but the vendors were happy with that.

Needless to say this was not in Dublin or in any big city so may not apply here at all. How many offers they have had or how many interested parties is important I think.

Flinty997

You see properties on sale for many years who won't drop their price.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118983005#Comment_118983005

You do. But there's no harm in asking. The properties that have been on the market for a fair while are the ones more likely to be open to dropping their price. No guarantee that they will, but a much better chance that if the property has only just started to be marketed.

Flinty997

The reason they are on the market for years is exactly because they won't drop their price.

waterwelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118979030#Comment_118979030

Unless there are already offers above it then its a perfectly reasonable starting price.

If the house is on for €450k and somebody offers €440k and its the highest bid, what is the issue?

Dodge

Getting into a general ‘price of stuff’ argument here I’d suggest.

It’s simple enough though. Seller/agent can ask for whatever they want, and can choose to accept/refuse any bids they like. They’re not obliged to accept any bids and can choose to sell it to whoever they like

Flinty997

I've noticed some people can be very stubborn on price. You see stuff over priced sit for years and years.

Always curious why

Allinall

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118983310#Comment_118983310

Generally people who are not in a rush to sell/ don’t need the cash.

They set a price they would be happy to sell at, and if it sells it sells.

JimmyVik

It makes no difference really. Your bid has been recorded anyway. Its not like it didnt exist. Its just too low to bother with.

If it happened that there were no higher bids the EA would most probably say to the vendor that they did receive an offer of x, but you told us that was too low. maybe you want to consider it in light of no higher bids.

But any higher bids come in and yours would just be thrown in the bin.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118979110#Comment_118979110

Why would there be a lot of downarrows on the price tracker of myhome.ie? Mistakes by the seller? If you go to page three on the list, at least for me, currently every single advertised price has been reduced relative to where it was at some point.

https://myhome.ie/pricechanges

Your argument is silly. If it were true, then if I was selling a property and the EA told me it would make 400k, I'd just tell him to put it on at 500k because some eejit would assume it is "worth" that because it is priced at that

(Direct link for page 3 of results https://myhome.ie/pricechanges/page-3 ...,. I assume it gets updated fairly regularly though )

Donald Trump

OP, the seller can sell to whom he likes. Even if you offer more, they can decide to sell to a lower bidder for whatever reason they want to.

Marcusm

Different perspective at different points in time. If you go back 20 years or do in Ireland (Dublin especially), a private treaty asking price would generally have been to in excess of what the property was expected to sell for whereas an advertised price for an auction was generally below the expected price. When I bought in Dublin 6 years ago the asking prices were generally above realistic selling prices reflected in the 50k reduction I got BA the asking price. Only one property of 20 I seriously looked at sold in excess of asking (and 30% over at that).

AySeeDoubleYeh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118979030#Comment_118979030

To call this unreasonable without literally any context is absurd. Even in the current market i know people who are sale agreed for very small % above asking - and that's final bid, not opening.

I doubt the 8 people that liked this comment are buyers.

Flinty997

Its not that its unreasonable. Its that its unrealistic.

EA's sometimes (often?) put up unrealistically low price to drive interest and get people emotionally involved. Once its in your head, people often let the dream get ahead of their sensible budget. If you come in under their false floor, you won't be taken seriously. The real starting point is probably 10% higher.

I'm sure someone will have an example where they got somewhere for half nothing by bidding low.

Dodge

We bid asking price for our house last year and finalised the sale in January.

But it doesn’t matter a jot to how other houses sell. The vendor and estate agent are within their rights to not accept any bid so that’s all the matters

As mentioned above, there’s no finite ‘value’ on any house. The market decides the price

mrslancaster

Afaik a licensed EA has to record any offer they receive, Name & Contact details, Method of offer and who received it, date & time, amount plus any conditions.

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058243294/can-an-estate-agent-refuse-an-offer-that-is-too-low

An agent is not a principal, they act on the instructions of their client and one of the reasons for hiring an agent is so you don’t have to deal with time wasters So when you tell agent that you won’t accept a price under 400k, then you don’t want to hear from him until he has an offer over 400k.

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118978963#Comment_118978963

Your idea of a reasonable starting point is not that of the sellers so why should they even want to know about you?

Buddy Bubs

I toyed with the idea of moving house last year, was scuppered by lack of anything else suitable for sale for me to move into.

Anyway, one estate agent I got around to potentially sell my house said they'd put it on market for 450k and another said they'd put it on for 400k and generate a lot of interest and a bidding war. They both reckoned 450k was in around what I'd get. So it's just 2 different ways of advertising really.

DFB-D

As an actual experience, I had a bid directly refused yesterday as too low.

The property was advertised as 80 sqm, when I viewed, it was only about 60sqm. But they still think they can get the asking price. Per sq meter it would be the most expensive property sold in the complex by far if they pull it off.

I hope they can't buy maybe someone is foolish enough to pay it. But it goes to show in the current market, there is always another bidder, they can afford to lose potential buyers.

Dav010

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118986813#Comment_118986813

That is a ~ 200ft2 difference, or a fairly decent sized room, what did the EA say when you pointed out what is an extraordinary anomaly with their advertisement?

sydthebeat

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118986813#Comment_118986813

Wow, that's then advertising a property being 33% bigger than it actually is!!

Ground for complaint I would imaging

ec18

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118986813#Comment_118986813

how do you know it was lower than advertised? is it you opinion that it looked smaller than it was advertised?

DFB-D

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118986849#Comment_118986849

They think it included the balcony, which was 3 sq meters. But the advert has been reduced to 65 sq m now.....

Someone messed up, which is not surprising, I think the agency usually handles rentals rather than sales!

DFB-D

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118987233#Comment_118987233

Far smaller, someone else said the same thing as I was walking away.

blackwhite

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118979531#Comment_118979531

We sold our previous home recently, and got a letter hand-delivered through the door from a bidder.

We'd engaged an agent to deal with prospective purchasers, and had given instruction on how we wanted to proceed. A prospective buyer ignoring that served nothing more than to piss us off (and in the OPs case, especially one who is offering an offer below what the seller has instructed the agent set as a baseline would have been worse again)

If you're looking for a quick way to turn the sellers against you, then you've suggested a really good way to do so.

DFB-D

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118986879#Comment_118986879

I'm not sure if a complaint will help, but they are small enough that I won't need to deal with them again if I don't want to..

brokenangel

When we sold our house a few years back, not as crazy as now we had a conversation with the estate agent. The agreement was to put up the house at below the price we wanted to increase the footfall.

I was clear the price I wanted for the house and said if anyone offers below XYZ don't even bother as they are just wasting everyone's time.

I was also not getting into the bulls**t I see of people bidding and putting 500 on each time. We also agreed a price to take the house off market if someone wanted to offer it. In the end the house sold every quickly, a lot of people said I probably could have got more if I held out but I wasn't interested in sitting around for months.

Sounds like the OP is offering below the clip the seller want, EA doesn't have to tell them. Sending letters to the owner or any of that rubbish will be a quick way to get the owners back up, they have hired a EA to sell the house, if they wanted to deal with it themselves they would have