Offer Accepted

With our Rightmove filter down to anything that had been added in the last 24 hours, our constant searching of estate agent's Facebook pages for the very latest properties brought to market and our daily bombardment of email bulletins about houses that we might be interested in, it's safe to say that our potential new home was on our minds 24/7. Eat. Sleep. Drink. Properties.

We'd begun to feel a little exhausted by our search, but by changing our filter one day, we came across a house that we'd seen previously but had been reduced in price. I called the agent to arrange a booking.

How quickly does the seller want to move?

On the morning of the viewing, the house was reduced even further. This wasn't ideal. By lowering the asking price for a second time, it attracted more interest. Great for the seller. Not so great for us, however.  

The seller showed us around at the viewing as the estate agent hadn't yet arrived. Some might not be comfortable with that, but the seller was very amicable, and we went ahead anyway.

We asked him whether there had been much interest, which seemed a valid question given that the house had been reduced that morning, to which he, of course, replied that there had. By asking this, though, he did say that he and his family had found a property that weekend and wanted to move relatively quickly. This was an excellent opportunity to state that we weren't in a chain and were open to a fast move.

Small things like this can give you an edge in a move. We'd been told that the seller didn't want to hang around with a move, and we were in a position to move quickly as well. There's nothing worse than being in a long chain knowing that anybody can hold up that move.

As we left the property, we bumped into the estate agent and informed him that we'd already viewed the property with the seller, and we had a brief chat. I asked whether reducing the price of the property had garnered more interest, to which he responded that it had, and off the back of the reduction, they'd booked in six more viewings that day.

Again, by asking the right questions, we understood the situation better and knew that if we wanted the property, we'd have to move quickly.

Making the offer

We called the estate agent first thing the following morning. I asked on the call whether there had been any offers on the house and was told that there had been four. 

There are a few things that you should ask when making an offer, and one of the most important is to find out whether offers have already been made. You can get a rough idea of where to pitch your offer by knowing this.

I found out that there had been four offers already. With that in mind, and knowing that we wanted the property, we went to the higher end of what we were willing to offer. 

From our experiences of other properties we'd been interested in, we knew how competitive the market was. With the asking price being reduced, we knew that would only further attract attention.

Once the offer was placed, the estate agent asked a few questions to confirm our details and outline the exact offer. In hindsight, we should have emailed the estate agent to verify the offer off the back of the phone call. 

From this point, it was just a waiting game to see whether the seller would accept our offer.

Offer accepted!

Within about 10 minutes, we got a call from the estate agent informing us that the offer had been accepted!

We went over a few more details and discussed the following steps, and that was that!

After being outbid on nearly all houses we wanted, having the offer accepted was a massive shock! Suddenly, we're potentially homeowners, and everything seemed very real...

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