Riva Bella

Hello,

Basically I have put an offer in on a house

The house is offered for £127 995

Its the ideal house and they dont come on the market that often


Eventually I went up to £124 995 (to stay under the Stamp duty threshold)

But they want asking price....

Can I say to the guy I will give him £1000 cash as well as the offer.

Also can I tell him to take it off the market and THEN I will buy it without the esatate agent taking there cut??

This would mean we both get what we want but the goverment / estate agent dont get anything.

Cheers

Andrew

alanbell

iTrader: (6)

Best to buy a rug (wink) from him for 1K thats more legal ishh , If the agent got you to see house , The seller may get some bother if you buy it ,

hades

You can legally pay an amount for fixtures and fittings, but it has to be a reasonable/justifiable amount. If you get caught paying £3k for a single small tatty curtain to avoid stamp duty, you would get prosecuted for tax evasion. Most solicitors will be able to advise on exactly what's do-able, but say £1k for carpets (or laminate etc) is generally likely to be reasonable and acceptable.

As for avoiding agents fees, it depends on what the contract he took out with the agents says, but if he has a "sole agency" contract with x weeks tie in, he'd have to wait at least until after the end of that tie in, or risk being sued for breach of contract. I don't doubt it can be done, but not straightforward, not ethical (although estate agents charges aren't exactly ethical for the work done either!).

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

All depends on the sellers contract with the estate agent. If there is a clause in there that allows the seller to sell the property by their own means without paying commission then you can do what you suggest (I think).

A lot of estate agents lock you in with a contract that means you have to pay them commission when your house sells, irrespective if they actually found the buyer.

If the reason you went to see the house was because his agent took you there then that is even more of a problem.

Riva Bella

Cheers

Looks like the estate agents will get there pound of flesh ...

What exactly do they do for it ??

If I see another one I will approach without the aid of one of these parasites

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

They advertise the property incurring massive *cough* costs that have to be paid for.

They do of course do more than that, after all a crappy estate agent can really put the brakes on a sale.

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

True, it is the seller that pays, but if the seller did not have to pay then they can lower their asking price and still get the same amount of cash. That interests the buyer

Basically, the chances of getting out of paying the agents are near nil. Lets face it, anyone who could get out of paying an agent would. Any agents that have contracts like that would not be there, they would have gone bust a while ago...

Terminator X

iTrader: (7)

Legal team will not let you get away with this sort of thing, more's the pity

TX.

Bakerman

You can do anything you want........................but will you get away with it?? Apparantly we paid our estate agent privately (he worked for a national) and we saved some cash and he got some tax free. Everybody in all walks of life has a price. I have known of several cases of people having an informal relationship with sellers purely to get around stamp duty.

This is a business txn, not an event to gain friends.

speedking

Previous advice.

MattN

First off the theashold is 125001 and above so you could offer 125,000!

It seems to me anyone selling a house for 128k should expect offers of 125k. You could make an asking price offer if the vendor pays the stamp duty. This means you don't have to fork out 1300 quid, yes the mortgage will be higher but not having that large outlay at the beginning is useful for most FTB's.

You are effectively offering 126,700 and the stamp will come out of the proceeds of the sale form the the vendor and your solicitor will take care of the rest.

Monkeybone

If the agent introduced you to the property then if you buy it up to 6 months after (or some period like that) they can claim the costs from the seller.

My folks run an agents and this happened to them, they showed someone round it who wanted it but then backed out. The guy then bought it through another agent a few months later. It sounds crazy but it's some law or in the agents contracts, and suffice to say my folks threatened court action to get their cash and the seller coughed up in the end as legally he didn't have a leg to stand on.

They knew about it as the guy buying the house was one of their friends.

Not all agents are ****s and rip off merchants, from what I've experianced the customers aren't much better!

Chip Sengravy

What, you mean parasites like YOU that are trying to do what is basically an honest business, and a bloke trying to earn a crust out, of his income?


So where did you see this house up for sale ? Where did you go to look for details that encouraged you to want to buy this property?

Estate agents window?...Hmmm...that's all free...it's all digital cameras now, they don't even have to buy film..
Rightmove?...hmmm, that's free aswell...


What a freeloading *** you are.










ps...Good wind up

hades

Advertising etc is not free by any means. However, considering most agents charge say 1.5% for a sole agency contract - which on a small detached family home on an estate in my area constitutes say £4k per house - it's difficult to see that they're providing value for money.

Put it another way. House prices have rocketed in the last few years. Technology available (digicams, rightmove etc) is making the agents job easier and not significantly pricier. Has their percentage dropped off, or has it stayed the same so their fee effectively rocketed in line with house price rises?

Not condoning trying to swindle them, as has been said before, the contract usually has some tie in so you couldn't do that anyway. Just suggesting that very few people are going to sympathise with the "poor estate agent slaving away to just stay above the breadline" kind of story.

Monkeybone

The flipside of that is with all this new tech and new ways of advertising agents are expected to do this as well as all the traditional advertising. People still want their houses in the papers, and that's not cheap, as well as on the companies own websites, and on all these rightmove.co.uk type sites.

Sod sympathising with them though, I know how much they make lol. Not saying it isn't deserved, but it's not a bad living. Infact I'm tempted to jack in my job and go work with my folks as the biggest problem for them is finding decent staff.

C_B_B

Just to throw some costings in on the above post;

Rightmove is £250 per office, per month.

Primelocation is £300 per office, per month.

A local office in a good high street location in this part of the world is in the region of £2000 per month.

Advertising in the local rag here costs in excess of £50000 a year for a double page spread each week.

All the advertising costs are net of VAT.

Chip Sengravy

^et, voila!


My office sits above an estate agents, and he's not raking it in..he just traded up to a 325, big wow!

Monkeybone

lol my step dad's just traded "up" from a 325 this week, went for a WRX as they had a cheap deal on lease hiring for a year

MattN

A local estate agent to me featured in the paper as having sold ore than £100m of property in the past year. Assuming a 1.5% commission thats £1.5m, there are 6 staff, so using the above costs and rounding up, add in a few other costs and it still leaves £1m+ between 6 staff (some are part time).

On the flip side when selling my house a couple of months back there were 26 estate agents in the local area! So it's cut throat.

My issue with them is yes they advertise each week in the paper (and it does work) it's unlikely your property is featured each week so although they have to pay for the ad, you don't always get the benefit.

Most property round my way sells in 3- 4 weeks so is only likley to feature once or twice in the paper, given there will be about 24 other properties on the page then a £1000 /week is £40 per property per week. So with other advertising it costs about £60-£70 per week per property until it's sold.

Fixed fee seems the best approach to me. let's face it you have a 500k house and 100k house on your books and both have an interested party for viewing, who are you going to do the viewing with?

I looked at prices for advertsing in the local paper for my house and a decent size ad worked out at £250 per week. But as an indivdual you can't get it on rightmove which is really where you need it. I did a bit of research and most people want to buy through an estate agent.

I went with an agent in the end for ease. I did get an offer, his offer was outside the agent and he wanted to know the fee as he'd knock that off the offer, so, he gets a few k of the price I get er nothing, great deal, now **** off, some people.