[Dozzer]

Hi all,

What sort of deposit would I be expected to pay on buying a house ?

Is the market similar to the UK one ?

Is it like the Scottish market ? - offer is final ?

[Bailers]

We paid 10% deposit which is the norm. The offer is binding but you can stipulate conditions such as "subject to finance", "subject to satisfactory LIM/building report". We found the whole house-buying process so much less stressful here than in the UK.

There's a guide on this site to house buying:

http://www.emigratenz.org/buying-a-house-in-new-zealand.html

Mark

[Avalon]

You can actually pay any amount of deposit you like. The thing to know is that it is whatever is stipulated in teh Sale and Purchase aggreement. (S+P).

Most agents will tell you to make it 10%. This is mainly because unlike in the UK (not sure about Scotland) - you pay the deposit direct to the agent. They then sit on it, and then keep the proportion of it which covers thier commision and pay the rest onto the vendor. So its in thier interests to make sure you pay a fair whack of money at this point. They wanna get paid!

If you want to, and can afford to, pay 10% - thats fine. And if you are going through a tender process where your offer gets looked at alongside other offeres at the asme time - it would have the effect of possibly making your offer look better.

But dont be pushed into it unless you feel its the right move for you. (ignore whats best for the agent). If you put in the S+P that you only want to pay a 1% deposit - and the vendor signs the aggreement - then thats what you pay!

Also - worth considering how much you are paying for the house. We bought an expensive house (600k) - so 10% is an AWFUL lot of money. We therefore stated a 5% deposit in the S+P. Oddly enough - on the day we paid it (when you go unconditional) it took the agents less than an hour to phone up the bank and tell then we had only paid half the deposit :D The bank manager (bless him) told them to go read the S+P :D

HTH

[dean1968]

Real estate agent usually wants to get paid and have no hassles later on. So it goes in their trust account (real estate). 10% is the norm which should cover their commission around 5 percent when you include gst and expenses like a marketing fee. If real estate agent can't sell property in this market he or she is never gonna sell

[Trigirl]

we paid a bit under 10% - we just wrote the figure we were prepared to pay straight into the S&P. one thing that was different from avalon's experience though is that we had to pay our deposit on the day the S&P was signed by both parties - not when it went unconditional which was a couple of weeks later.