Catalpa-dream house or nightmare?

The seller's agent for the house on Catalpa (read below) called our agent last week and countered their own counter offer(?) from $230,000 to $225,000. We asked an electrician to do a rough estimate on redoing the electrical. He quoted us $12,000. Which is about what we expected. We asked our agent to pass this along to the seller's agent to see if there were some middle ground to meet.

He replied that he would not discuss this as we did not have an offer put on the table so to speak! I will remind you that he contacted us!

The electrician also said that we don't have to rewire the entire house as long as we only plug certain things into certain parts of the house. A lamp here, a vacuum there, maybe not at the same time. It is safe to say, we will not be using this electrician!

I understand that we are looking at older houses that have more charm, in my opinion, but also inherent costs to maintain. Is it too much to ask for functional electrical for close to a quarter of a million dollars?

I suppose everyone in real estate (agents, electricians, etc.) have made enough money...