Mortgage advice

How much below £20k is your income. You should be able to borrow 2.5 times income fairly easily, and higher income multiples tend to be readily available these days.

Do you have a deposit? How much?

In message , ck26 writes

income multiples tend to be readily available these days.

Then I should be fine I hope - its not much after all.

Not really - do you think a loan for this amount might be better than getting a mortgage?

Definitely not the interest rate would be about double! p.s. Where can you buy a house for 45k?

My understanding is that with the scottish system offers over 45k means they expect +30% = 60k and highest bidder by sealed bid gets the property.

Still lots at max. 34k though. Temping - glaswegians are great.

Everything seems to mean something different in scottish. Check out this villa:

Software author. (please edit my email addr. to prove you're not a dumb 'bot) Web Log Analyzer by Search Term

I'm not sure how much you would need to offer, but yes, "Offers Over" does mean highest bidder by sealed bid gets it.

Fixed Price means first person to offer the asking price gets it.

Yes, and "offer" means you have to pay up if it is accepted. "Acceptance" means the transaction is going ahead. "Gazumping" is something that happens in England.

Offers 30% over the asking price are pretty exceptional. Yes, they have tended to happen somewhat frequently of late, but that's against a backdrop of prices rising at 20% or more per year. In more normal times 10% over the asking price was a more likely expectation.

That's not true. All this "sealed bid" nonsense sounds terribly melodramatic, and it may well be how things were done in bygone days, but it's much more de rigueur to submit offers by fax. Typically there is some sounding out by phone beforehand. As a rule, bidding is not all that blind. Only if interest justifies it will a formal closing date be set and offers will be invited without the amounts being disclosed to the other bidders.

Also, although the highest offer is likeliest to be accepted, it might not be. For example, offers may be subject to constraints of proposed time of completion, and a seller might be happier to accept a slightly lower offer with imminent completion than a slightly lower one involving a long delay. There is even at times a hint of snob's honour, where a seller will only sell to a "suitable" buyer and would turn away some nouveau-riche parvenu, a footballer perhaps, in favour of someone of decent stock and old money.

In principle, yes. In practice, advertising a house at fixed price sends the signal that the seller hasn't been able to attract a buyer at an offers-over price, and that therefore there's a good chance of a lower offer being accepted.

In theory. In practice, an offer is rarely accepted unconditionally first time, but with conditions. The conditional acceptance then is an "offer to accept your offer", which the buyer is capable of accepting by agreeing that the extra conditions are OK. Typically there will be several iterations of counter-offers before a mutually acceptable set of terms are thrashed out. Even in Scotland there is opportunity during this process for competing offers to come in and be considered.

The only real difference between the Scottish and English systems is that certain types of condition a buyer might wish to impose (such as the offer being subject to survey) are by tradition simply not acceptable because of the undesirable renegotiating it could lead to. Less contentious conditions are generally accepted and where time for compliance is required, this is built into the period between the equivalent of exchange and completion. The overall time from offer to completion is probably not much less in Scotland, but that from offer to exchange is usually very much less indeed. It's typically a few days, sometimes a little longer. If it gets very much longer, it will probably fall through. Six weeks is the usual interval agreed from exchange ("conclusion of missives") to completion ("date of entry").

I have turned up with my bid at twelve o' clock on the appointed day and waited with other people to be told what was happening. It does seem to be dying out however.

I had two friends who wheeled and dealed in property, neither of whom trusted their own solicitor and they always insisted in being there in person. One of them would get his solicitor to draw up two offer documents and would decide based on the number of people there whether to submit the lower or higher offer.

The other got his solicitor to draw up an offer document with the price left blank and filled in the value himself.

James

"Jonathan Bryce" wrote

I heard that if missives are not concluded, that the contract falls through (no penalty). Apparently one way for missives not to be concluded is for one side not to reply to any communications from the other side. Thereby, effectively, initial offer does not create a *binding* contract - because it is conditional on conclusion of missives...

Is there any truth to this?

Correct. In such case there is no contract so there can be no penalty.

Sort of. It's not cricket, though. It is more polite to decline an offer than neither to decline nor accept it. The problem is that if you neither accept nor reject the offer, then in theory the offer remains on the table indefinitely and would be capable of being accepted years later. To prevent this, offers tend to include a deadline for acceptance, after which the offer is automatically withdrawn.

Well, an offer never creates a contract. Acceptance of an offer creates a contract. The acceptance has to involve agreeing to all the conditions in the offer, and must not involve adding any new conditions. That then *is* the conclusion of missives, so there is never any point in an offer being conditional of their conclusion, unless it stipulates that they be concluded by a specific deadline.