Fuming...advice needed!

marky.fitz

Hi All

Hope someone can help.

A description of our circumstances.

My partner and I viewed a property through an estate agent and liked the property so much we made an offer throgh this agent. They came back to us to tell us the seller would accept our offer and take his property of the market as long as we had sold our property - which we had.

A day or 2 later we receive a compliments slip from a new agent in the area asking us to give them a call regarding the sellers property. We rung them to find out the seller wants to use this new agent as they have offered to sell his property for 1% fee as opposed to the original agents fee of 3%.

We therefore made an offer through the new agent which was accepted (we did at the time ask if there would be a problem as we were introduced by another estate agent and were told by both the new agent and seller that this wouldn't be a problem).

Yesterday we find out that the original estate agent has threatened to sue both the seller and new agent as they originally introduced us.

The new agent then rings us to ask us to come to their offices to sign a form stating that we viewed the property with them (which obviously we didn't). We have refused to sign this document in case we get dragged into the legalities of it all and also end up been sued.

We are going ahead with the sale of our property as we do not want to let our buyer down so we now have 4 weeks to fnd another property for myself and my 7 month pregnant partner, not a real situation!

Have we any grounds to sue either the seller or new agent for the costs we have incurred as they put us under pressure to get a survey done which we have paid for and we also instructed a solicitor?

Thanks

Mark

mark55man

I think you won't have any luck. to be honest I think you shouldn't have offered through the new agent, as there was always going to be trouble. The old agent obviously had a legitimate case

if its any reassurance the only people who seem culpable in this are the new agent and the vendor. i am sorry its caused problems for your house, but you are probably well out of it - if they lay those tricks on their advisors - god only knows what they would have done to you

I am glad you did not see fit to lie - that would have been wrong and you could have ended up in trouble as well - despite meaning your desired house is lost.

two choices really - full scale hunt for a replacement, or make sure you are secure for next 12 months or so wherever else you are

Cannon_Fodder

Of course the new agent and seller would say it was ok...the former stood to gain 1% for no effort, the latter gains 2% for little effort...

What a scummy seller, to let someone else do the work, then switch when they have an offer...

You are probably best off out of it, as you don't know what they had in mind to try and pull the wool over your eyes in ways that would impact you more directly, if they are that type of person.

Don't know what area you are in, but in mine there are several decent-ish properties re-appearing on the market that had previously given up during the crash, so maybe there will be a wider selection than you saw a while back.

And with winter approaching fast, prices are dropping on older stock, too. Could be a bargain to be had.

Doubt there's much likelihood of recovering your costs, and you knew what you were doing, deep down, didn't you?

marky.fitz

Thank for the advice.

A lot's happened over the weekend!

I rang the buyer directly and offered to pay the difference between the 2 agents which he seemed happy with on Friday (but the way he's mucked us about I'm not taking anything for definite!)

I was tempted to walk away from the whole deal but theres not a lot of choice out there at the moment and we've nly got 4 weeks left till we exchange/compete on ours!

One other point was just to say is how good London and Country have been and how much I would recomend them. They have got me a cracking mortgage deal (2.29% above BOE base rate) and helped me out with various issues.