The return of gazundering
2008 has been a vintage year for dinosaur words emerging behemoth-like from the depths of financial prehistory. Of course these aren’t the sort of monsters anyone really wanted to see again. First we had stagflation and now the dread return of gazundering, which most of us haven’t seen since the most bearish of UK residential property markets back in the early 1980s.
Gazundering is simple. You make an offer on a house, you get close to completion, then you go back and say you’re putting in a lower offer. By that point the seller has gone a long way down the road of purchasing their next home and has incurred a lot of expense. Hey, maybe they’re about to complete and have moved their children to a new school near the new house. None of which bothers the masterminds behind www.firsthomebuyer.co.uk who not only give you a step by step guide to the process (really not that complex a process I’d have thought) but also produce a lengthy mea exculpa on why gazundering is not only good but is ethically sound also.
The masthead proclaims that ‘this web site is produced by ‘three young couples’ buying our first homes. We hope you like it.’ I don’t actually, I think it stinks, and I very much doubt that the ‘three young couples’ actually exist (their identities have been ‘withheld’ because they’ve been ‘threatened and intimidated by the real estate industry’. Hmmm … what does this mean? They’ve been revving up their heliotrope and banana coloured new model Beetles and Minis outside the couples’ flats? They’ve been blanket mailing them with unsuitable properties that don’t match the couples’ search spec, or not returning their calls? Ah no, that’s what estate agents do anyway.
Apparently when you gazunder your buyer, he’ll just go up the chain and renegotiate HIS price and so on back to the top of the chain (who is ‘probably a property developer’ anyway). Easy as that. It isn’t, as they say, illegal, but using the fact that your behaviour isn’t yet against the law is a pretty flimsy and craven defence. You CAN gazunder, though you risk seriously queering your pitch with local buyers and agents, and you have to ask yourself ‘Do I feel good about what I’m doing’. Be aware too, that many people may not be pragmatic and may just tell you to ‘**** your offer’. I know I would. By all means drive a hard bargain, but if you do this you’re lying to people aren’t you. Your choice. See more on house prices in ‘price your house realistically‘.
