Cheeky Discounted Offers Increase on Property Sales

Unsuprisingly, online property sales portal Zoopla has reported that sellers (vendors) are accepting much lower offers when selling their property than before to get a sale.

We all know we are currently in a world adjusting to higher interest rates, mortgage payments and cost of living in general.  With that in mind, purrchasers cannot higher mortgage payments to afford inflated property prices and a making lower offers so that they can afford to buy the property.

Zoopla reports that

• 42% of vendors are accepting lower offers of at least 5% below the asking price.
• 15% of vendors are accepting lower offers of at least 10% below the asking price.
• Demand has fallen with 14% less buyers in the last 4 weeks compared compared to the same time last year.
• Supply i.e., the number of properties for sale has increased by 18% in the last 4 weeks compared to the same time last year meaning there is more competition to sell and prices will fall.

Comment

These figures are no surprise.  There is a natural property cycle in place at present and even if your property falls in value back to before the post pandemic boom, most people should still be in a healthy equity position provided they did not pay an inflated price when they bought.  Remember, average UK property values over the last 6 years are as follows (source Office for National Statistics):

The reality is that we are returning to average growth after the boom during and post pandemic.  When looking at average property inflation, we would expect the average UK property value to currently be around £262,000, so we do expect property prices to fall around 8% during this difficult period and thus return to average growth levels.  Therefore, we would expect any purchaser to offer around 10% below a property asking price and a vendor to accept an offer of 5% below the asking price.