Want To Actually Do Something?

[gilf]

In response the post earlier suggesting we all chip in £5 and buy a house to start the crash, how about this.

Get a copy of the local property suppliment in the free paper and ring up all the agents and offer 20% less for one property for each agent. If you and your family have mobile phones you can then double up and pretend to be somebody else and put in a similar offer. I'm not claiming this will start a crash but it would be an interesting experiment in isolation.

I reckon if enough people on here do this for a smallish area and concentrate on a particular property type it really could have an effect on the people selling.

If you had 30 people offering to pay 20% less on your property I'm sure alarm bells would ring and you would consider the price was over the odds.

Of course if anybody accepts the offer you just say having considered it 20% was too much and your now offering 30% less (an so on).

1 lower offer is seen as an insult, a constant stream of them becomes reality.

I know somebody here is keeping tabs on my area (Sidcup, Bexely) and if a couple of people were happy to do a bit of leg work and visit a few properties this would make it look like there was interest and could also farm the real address to circumvent the Estate Agent if he was unwilling to pass the offers on.

Edited January 26, 2006 by gilf

[Jason]

Instead of ringing, why don't you write letters and post them to the actual house for sale. You can use that letter that was on Firstrung.co.uk. Leave out a phone number, and put the return address to some empty house.

[Jack Chilli]

Instead of ringing, why don't you write letters and post them to the actual house for sale. You can use that letter that was on Firstrung.co.uk. Leave out a phone number, and put the return address to some empty house.

The problem is, the EA will encourage another 'serious' buyer to offer 10% less, and they'll think they've got a good deal. I know from experience that after haggling 20% off two properties, that I genuinely was interested in (not at the same time, but one after the other) the exact same thing happened - all I managed was to give some other FTB mugs a discount they wouldn't have got otherwise. It lowers the price a bit, whiuch helps, but doesn't affect anything much.