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

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.

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

JohnnyChimpo

I went in at 10% below asking (back in late 2019), and got it at that price+5k after a little hardball. Not common I know, but it was a probate motivated seller, and things were less insane a couple years ago. Just an anecdote to show that it does happen