u/Massive_Contact8583

My husband and I have toured a house listed at a price of £900k.

However, it needs quite a bit of work doing (e.g. it needs repointed, among other things.) It’s a Georgian property and hasn’t been maintained *extremely* well. (It’s effectively a summer home for the current owners so this is to be expected.)

After a discussion with his father (who is a chartered surveyor), my husband wants to offer £795k, as he feels that’s what the discount rate is for the required work.

This is 88% of current list price, and the property has been for sale since July last year so I think they’re probably expecting for the price to come down a bit.

However, for the sake of an additional 5k I can’t help but feel it would be worth clearing the psychological barrier of being within 100k.

Thoughts?

My husband owns a house from before we met. We are upsizing. The house needs to sell in order for us not to be whacked with second home stamp duty as we’re purchasing a house together.

The problem is that the estate agents we’ve spoken to have vastly, vastly different views on how the house should be priced. We’ve had one as high as £535k and insisting it should be “offers over” that, even. One at £425k. One at £485k. The bank values it at £502k. Bought ten years ago for £415k.

There aren’t really any comps we can use because it’s a period cottage with character features in the middle of the Cambridgeshire countryside. It’s a very “unique” property and therefore I think will have a limited buyer pool.

We need to price it to sell, really, but understandably my husband is very worried that if we go with the lowest price that he’ll be leaving money on the table. Whereas I’m worried if we go at the higher end with where the market is right now we could end up sitting on it for months, which we don’t want either.

Has anyone faced a similar situation? Where have you found it best to sit in terms of pricing strategy with such disparate valuations?

My husband’s ex is really competitive with him as a parent. We’ve had pockets of high-conflict behaviour over the years but to her credit she has owned some of her past insecurities and controlling behaviour and got a lot better, and this is now the main issue in our “coparenting”.

She is a really good mom, but wants to be all things to the kids. She hates having to split custody at all, a lot of her identity is wrapped up in being a mother so the coparenting is really hard for her (this is in her own words). This manifests a lot as constantly trying to one-up or prevent us from doing “special things” with the kids. Every holiday, birthday etc. that should fall on our time is a battle because she wants to be involved as much as possible. If we buy a gift, she has to buy them the best version of that thing from her so she’s still the “top” parent.

A lot of our lives look like her ferreting out information about our plans and then one-upping. Or, if she can’t, being a bit sulky and crying down the phone about “missing out.” It is what it is, I’ve largely made my peace with it.

The kids’ next break from school is our time, and we have planned to take them on a little staycation to a nearby town with a particular feature, let’s say a petting zoo. This is my first time taking PTO this year and it’s been an expensive trip (we’re currently buying a house so have otherwise been extremely frugal the past few months) so I asked my husband not to make a big deal of it, because I wanted to be able to have one thing that didn’t get turned into a contest.

Well, it was my SD’s birthday last week and at her party BM says to us “so what are your plans over break?” And I was thinking “please be non-comittal” but my husband is a shit liar, especially under pressure and said “oh! We’ve booked *local town* to do *petting zoo.*” I’m not about to argue with him over it so I let it go. She’s their mom, she should know where they’re going to be blah blah.

Welp. Last night we get a text “hey, I was just thinking because I have the kids for the weekend after they break up from school, why don’t we [as in her and her husband] go to “local town” and get them settled in, and we can do handover there for a change! So, I’ve booked a cabin for us Friday-Sunday :))”

It has honestly soured me on the whole thing. Now I’m taking a week of PTO and have dropped $1k on a trip where I’m going to turn up and the kids are going to be like “oh we already at that restaurant with mom so maybe we should go somewhere else.”

I just want one fucking thing. And I knew she would pull something like this if she knew we were doing a trip. And I don’t want to argue with my husband about it. But the pattern is blindingly obvious at this point and I wish he’d wake up a bit.