[andrewandjane]

HI

keen to know what sort of flexibility there is in auckland house prices eg a house on waiheke going for 300 000 what sort of offers are sensible?

do people pay the asking prices of offer a lot less and move up?
if so what sort of margin is there for getting money off?

ta

Andrew

[Angelonthemove]

Not in Auckland but house genrally go for 10+% MORE than the asking or BEO price. Thats if you are lucky enough to be the top price that comes out of the hat if its a popular house. Makes budgeting hard.

See threads on housing prices on previous post. Its all very confusing to those of us new to NZ.

Angela

[willsken]

We aren't in Auckland but we have just had an offer on a house accepted. First off we offered 10% below asking price but they said no and after haggling they accepted $13,000 below the asking price. It hasn't gone through yet and they can still accept a higher offer if we can't produce the funding within 5 days of them telling us about the higher offer.

[sizzlingbadger]

Try and find comparable properties and what they sold for. The current valuation on the property as well is a good starting point but sometimes the selling price is way over that :confused:

It depends also on the interest in the property and how long the property has been on the market. Ask yourselves what you feel comfortable paying for the property and start a bit below that, you never know you could get a good bargain :)

[StevieD]

I have been told similar to this, it pays to haggle because let's face it, like most things in the property market, they are there to be knocked down (or fall down oops)

[Caroline and Dave]

The golden rule is never offer the asking price .allways come in lower but not too low,say 10%.This will probably be rejected but then you come up until an acceptable price is met.We offered 10% less on our land and ended up saving 5%. As said already try to find out the average price in the area.Some houses are overpriced.
Useful sites are
www.linz.govt.nz/audiences/propertyowners/index.html
www.rpnzreports.co.nz
www.terranet.co.nz

Hope this helps

Dave and Caroline

[diforsyth]

I bought the book "The Streetwise Homebuyer" from the same company as "Where to Live in Auckland" and have to say it's worth a read. One thing that jumped out at me was to ask the vendor how they arrived at their asking price.

David.

[MarkS]

Hi,

We're going through the homebuying process at the moment. It's very different to what we're used to in the UK - there you would see an asking price and offer 5 - 10% below. Here you see an asking price and have to offer 5 - 10% above! Very difficult to get our head around!

In fact, we looked at one house recently where the price dropped 10% or so before we looked at it - "there's a story there", said the estate agent. Turns out the sellers were English, and so they'd told the agents to price it at 5% above what they actually hoped to get. The agent then had a word and they re-priced it at 5% below what they actually hoped to get!

Not to say that what Caroline & Dave say above is wrong, but I believe the market for buying land is significantly different to the housing market.

cheers
Mark

[Ana&Steve]

Thanks for the links, Dave and Caroline! :)
Ana

[Caroline and Dave]

This article gives you an idea about the process of buying a house in NZ and one of the sentences says " Unless the market is red hot it is normal to offer less than the asking price. www.emigratenz.org/buying-a-house-in-new-zealand.html
Obviously if several people are after one house then you may well have to pay more than the asking price. Very good houses in New Zealand are snapped up very quickly and you may have to pay a bit more but houses that have been hanging around a bit usually an offer will be accepted.Obviously you need to get any house checked out by an expert.
Hope this helps

Dave and Caroline

[MarkS]

Interesting - in Wellington at the moment, it's really not normal to offer less than the asking price! I hope the rest of the country is more normal.

Thanks for the links too, I've been meaning to check out Terranet for a while, and keep forgetting.

[Avalon]

Interesting - in Wellington at the moment, it's really not normal to offer less than the asking price! I hope the rest of the country is more normal.

Thanks for the links too, I've been meaning to check out Terranet for a while, and keep forgetting.
Actually - you are not far off the mark (excuse the pun).

It really depends on the city, suburb, size of house and state of house as to whether you need to offer more or less than the "asking price".

In some areas, houses are selling at less than GV (the government Value that the rates are based on). When you take into account that often the "Market Value" (as decided by a registered valuation) of a property is much more than the GV - its shows that there can be a wide difference in where your final price may end up.

For me - If Im looking at a property and REALLY want to know what to offer - id pay for an independent registered valution. That would tell me the absolute maximum I would pay for that property if im buying it to live in.

The best reason I can see for doing this rather than using a "rule of thumb" of 5-10% above or below is that some sellers' ideas of what there home is worth in the current market are (to put it politely) a bit far out ;)

For investment properties - its a whole different ball game - and you need to buy as low as you possible can - and below GV if possible.

[incredible hulse]

Interesting - in Wellington at the moment, it's really not normal to offer less than the asking price! I hope the rest of the country is more normal.

Thanks for the links too, I've been meaning to check out Terranet for a while, and keep forgetting.
From the information we gained when buying (6 months ago) we found this not to be true - despite what most Real Estate agents tried to lead us to believe ! We offered 110K less than the BEO figure on our property in Kapiti and haggled from there (eventually getting it 6% less than BEO and 25K less than the valuation we had done). This was in a high growth area but we just found that agents and vendors were trying to take advantage of the rising market and asking ridiculous amounts. We have heard numerous similar accounts from friends who bought recently in Seatoun, Hataitai and Eastbourne also. I personally would recommend to offer what you think it is worth/want to pay (minus a little ;) ) and try and get a countersign; even if the agents try and talk you into offering more.

[MarkS]

Interesting stuff. We've been looking in Wellington's centralish suburbs (i.e. 30 to 40 mins walk to the CBD), and houses generally shift very quickly. We've followed up with the estate agents about every house we've looked at - without exception, they've sold for at least 5% more than the asking price. One particularly lovely place that we looked at but decided we couldn't afford went for about $120k more than the GV - the lowest of the six tenders they got was $60k over the GV apparently. Pricey!

[Nathan]

... We've followed up with the estate agents about every house we've looked at - without exception, they've sold for at least 5% more than the asking price. ...

Is this information pretty easy tp get? And is it available from anyone other than the agents? Is there a public record of the sale prices?

[andrewandjane]

thanbks for all the responses, reckon we will offer a bit less just like you do here and see what happens, we have been keeping an eye on the market for a while so have an idea of a few properties that have been advertised for some time and will think off offering less on some of these when the time comes. (got to get there first)

[Trigirl]

any estate agent will give you a record of recent sales. also once a property has an offer accepted - eg the day after a tender - the agent will tell you what the property went for. we've been keeping a big list of each one we've seen, what condition it was in, what the rating valuation is, how much they asked for it (eg BEO or if the agent was prepared to discuss a guide price) and finally how much it went for.

once you are thinking about making an offer on a specific property you can get a QV report which costs about $35. this tells you a bit about the property (legal title info, floor area etc) and gives a likely selling range and a list of other local relevant sales (address, date of sale, size of the property - both inside and the size of the section, what its constructed out of, how much it sold for)

again our experience has been that they have been selling completely off the scale even of the QV reports. we looked at one in brooklyn, got the QV which gave a rating valuation of $530k and a selling range of $530k to $580k. we assumed it would go for about $550k and thought about putting in an offer at that level (we didn't as we didn't have finance quite ready) but in any case we wouldn't have got it as it went for over $660k at tender.

that one is quite extreme though - what we are more normally seeing is houses selling for 5-15% above the BEO figure.

anyway - we've finally had an offer accepted on a place we really love so i'm one happy girl today :) assuming the builders report and LIM are ok we move in in 3 weeks time! it all happens so fast here!

[eternalkiwi]

As Trigirl says you can get this information from the QV site, I also remember they gave you some information for free, though it was a little hard to find how you avoided their 'please pay' pages.
Also valuation companies also keep this information.

Brooklyn is a very popular suburb in Wellington with strong growth in recent years.
House prices have increase over 60% in the last 3-4 years. Even Rating Valuations have increased about 15% in the last year. As Wellington City Council annually adjust their valuations, this also means that you property rates also increase each year.