ADVICE PLEASE! Buying & selling with the same estate agent- pros & cons

chickmug

guppy wrote: »

Well any kind of agent (solicitor, surveyor, estate agent) has a duty to act in the best interests of their client at all time. An estate agent's client is the seller. If they are acting for both seller and buyer, then there is potential for conflicts of interest.

What is best for you, might not be best for the person whose house you are buying.

It might not be an issue in your case, but its certainly something the agent should consider.

Unless there is a law to say an EA can't act for the seller and buyer any EA will take on the buyers property - after all you can't turn business down.

Having said that we feel we are acting in the middle of all transactions and are there to help all parties reach their end aims. OK we are being paid by the seller but feel we need to give the buyer good advice and in our case that's why we get a high percentage of those, who bought from us, come back to us when they want to sell.

Now and again we have a difficult situation usually caused by one side or the other being absolutely awkward where we need to assert ourselves very strongly and I guess in those cases acting for both sides could potentially be difficult. But we have always got through the difficult scenarios but I am really not sure how less expereinced EA's would of managed.

Lakey

We had this situation last year, my buyers went with the same agent. It was a disaster, inevitably someone would be pushed into a back seat somewhere along the chain, and it was me. I would have thought my EA would have wanted a sale, but ended up being lied to and the sale fell through dramatically.
Keep your own cards close to your chest, trust noone and believe nothing.:money: Keep your interests separate, different solicitor etc.

Incisor

Lakey wrote: »

We had this situation last year, my buyers went with the same agent. It was a disaster, inevitably someone would be pushed into a back seat somewhere along the chain, and it was me. I would have thought my EA would have wanted a sale, but ended up being lied to and the sale fell through dramatically.
Keep your own cards close to your chest, trust noone and believe nothing.:money: Keep your interests separate, different solicitor etc.

Agree about different solicitor, absolutely. But what happened with your deal? It would be useful to know how that went wrong, because I don't see that it is inevitable someone will be pushed into a back seat.

guppy

chickmug wrote: »

Unless there is a law to say an EA can't act for the seller and buyer any EA will take on the buyers property - after all you can't turn business down.

There's no law against acting for both parties -if they both consent. But if the agent then breaks their fiduciary duty of care to either client they can be sued.

"A fiduciary duty is the highest standard of care at either equity or law. A fiduciary is expected to be extremely loyal to the person to whom he owes the duty (the "principal"): he must not put his personal interests before the duty, and must not profit from his position as a fiduciary, unless the principal consents." - From Wikipedia

There is some EA specific stuff in this article:

http://www.estateagencynews.co.uk/news/news-0708e.asp

Madmel

I'm with Lakey.

We sold MiL's bungalow and as we lived 300 miles away (and it was in DH's name) MiL chose the EA. Her quote was "a good local firm". Yeah right!

They started off promising her a high price, so she was dazzled by that and went with them. Of course it was unrealistic so she had to reduce and reduce again. Finally someone came along, made a reasonable offer and MiL/DH accepted. Problem was that the buyer then asked the EA to sell their house. At that point the chain stalled completely.

We had bought MiL's retirement flat for her, borrowing £50k from a relative of mine as a bridging loan til the money came through from the sale. The relative started getting twitchy (not surprisingly as this dragged on and on). The buyer was also getting their mortgage through the EA, so our piddly sale was chicken feed to them and they were much more interested in how much commission they would make from the sale and mortgage of our buyers.

In the end, MiL and DH were having heated phone conversations, our solicitor was going crazy at the EA so I stepped in and gave the EA an ultimatum: exchange by 4pm today (solicitor said it was ready to go and had been for a week) or the deal's off, the house is off the market and you are sacked as EAs. Funnily enough, exchange happened at 2.30pm with completion a week later:rotfl:

I would keep the sale & purchase completely separate.

Lakey

It was such a huge mess I'm not sure where to start. Basically the EA was very friendly with my buyer so I heard all the relevant information after it had been filtered through my buyers. They would have meetings to discuss tactics, when they made the offer I only accepted it because they said they had cash buyers for their property. This was an untruth and in fact they were in a chain. While all the paperwork was going through I thought it was all hunky dory, then I looked on rightmove and saw my buyers house was back up for sale. It turns out their buyer had pulled out, the one I didn't know existed. Still the whole truth didn't come out, turns out they and the EA decided that I didn't need to know. Needless to say the chain broke down. Meanwhile I'd turned down another offer because I was assured the first one was chain free.
Thats not even all of it, haven't got time to go into all details, but in a small town where the EA and buyers had all grown up together etc and I was a foreigner etc etc....

Nightmare city, it really stressed me out.

Incisor

Lakey wrote: »

It was such a huge mess I'm not sure where to start. ... Needless to say the chain broke down. Meanwhile I'd turned down another offer because I was assured the first one was chain free.
Thats not even all of it, haven't got time to go into all details, but in a small town where the EA and buyers had all grown up together etc and I was a foreigner etc etc....

I'm not sure I would draw the conclusion that you should not have 1 agent responsible for sales of both seller's and buyer's houses. I think that exactly the same would have happened if you had insisted your buyer go with a different agent to avoid 'conflict of interest'. The problem is that your agent felt more allegiance to his mate from the old days than he did to his client.

olibrofiz

Last year I sold and bought through one EA. My buyer was a right pain in the @ss and the EA's were fantastic. I felt that as both houses were with them they made more of an effort.

Definately separate solicitors tho.