How to negotiate buying a house: Expert tips and tricks

If you’re serious about a property, the next step is to negotiate the property purchase price. We know this can be an overwhelming and confusing process, so before you make an offer, give our expert property negotiation tips a read.

Whether you’ve found your dream home or you’re just starting the property purchase process, it’s important to have a good understanding of how negotiating plays a part in the real estate game. The day-to-day reality of buying a house is that there’s a lot of negotiating involved, and many properties sell for below the asking price.

Here’s some house buying negotiation tips from our Johnston Grocke property experts:

1.  Check out the competition. If there’s a lot of people interested, your offer needs to be at the upper end. If it’s only yourself or one other, your offer can be at the lower end
2. Be strategic about open inspections. Try to arrive 10 minutes early, and wait in the car for 20 minutes to see how many other people are interested in this property
3. Once you’ve put your offer in, the agent may suggest you need to increase the offer due to other bidders, and at this stage, you need to determine if they’re bluffing or telling the truth. If you think you’re the only buyer, stay firm. If there’s actual competition, you may need to increase your offer
4. Only offer what you think the property is worth, and consider what price you are willing to walk away
5. Don’t get hung up over the small percentages, ie $5-10k. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t make much difference.
6. Understand the price range of the property. Do your research and look online, ie Realestate and Domain. Look at similar houses in that street and suburb and what they recently sold for. This will give you a good indication of the price. Ask yourself, has there been any price reductions? How long has it been on the market?
7.  If a property is overpriced, it will stay on the market longer (90 days is a long time in real estate terms for metro suburbs). If the house has been on the market for 7 days and there’s been 40 groups of people inspecting the house, there’s a good chance this property will sell quickly and for the upper asking price of above!