Many sellers are seeing offers slashed right before exchange (Picture: Getty)
The day before she was due to exchange contracts, the people buying Katharine Storr’s family home slashed their offer by £30,000.
‘They were bringing up all kinds of things which were in the survey, but weren’t issues at all,’ said the mum, 38, who lives in Tooting with her husband Matt and their kids.
‘They had us over a barrel and knew it, as we have three children and were moving house for schools.’
Like many selling a property in the current market, Katharine had been gazundered – when a buyer reduces their offer at a late stage of negotiations to pressure the seller into accepting less money.
According to research by House Buyer Bureau, 31% of UK home sellers over the last six months of 2023 were victims of gazundering, with a third saying it happened within a week of their exchange date.
House buying company Quick Move Now also found that gazundering on its platform rose 13% between October and November last year. And while the majority of these sales were renegotiated at a lower price, 17% fell through as a result.
Moving house is already considered to be one of the most stressful events in our lives, so shifting the goalposts at the last minute puts even more strain on everyone involved.
‘We were so upset and angry,’ writer Katharine told Metro.co.uk. ‘It felt awful, everything had gone so smoothly until that point and then it felt like they were inventing issues that weren’t there to try to get money off.’
But the tactic worked for the buyer and, backed into a corner, they accepted £15,000 less than the original offer.
Katharine and her husband Matt were ‘upset and angry’ over the last-minute reduction (Picture: Katharine Storr)
Three quarters of sellers who’ve been gazundered reported that they also gave into the pressure and accepted, with reasons including believing the lower offer was still fair, not wanting to jeopardise their onward sale, and not wanting to waste more time finding another buyer.
This was the case for Evie Richards, 25, who was keen to sell the house she shared with her boyfriend after they broke up, so she could move on with her life.
The deputy SEO editor from South London and her ex put the property on the market in February last year but didn’t accept an offer until June.
‘The offer was already around £20,000 below asking,’ she told Metro.co.uk. ‘But it was at the bottom end of what the house was valued at and we weren’t making a loss (breaking more-or-less even) so reluctantly agreed – knowing that this is just how the market is, and we both wanted out of our current situation.’
By September, they were ready to sign on the dotted line when Evie got a call from her solicitor while she was at work. The buyer claimed that unless they were willing to accept an offer £30,000 less than agreed, he’d ‘walk away’ completely.
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Source:: Metro
