Selling without estate agent

oneandonlydebbie

The service maybe hasnt been appalling but it hasnt been great, we dont have a copy of the contract, we had to contact them with regards to the for sale signs, they gave us the option to defer payment for 9 months but didnt explain that we'd have to provide direct debit details, rather than credit card details, in order to do this.

The prospective buyer owns downstairs and rents it out, he has a few properties and says the rental market where we are is really good. He found out it was for sale cos he saw the for sale sign in the window when he passed yesterday.

if we were gonna do it we'd wait until the deal was all done and dusted and then inform the estate agent.

We've paid 400 for marketing fee's, we've still to pay commision fee's once the house is sold.

Kaj

oneandonlydebbie wrote: »

he saw the for sale sign in the window when he passed yesterday.

Then you should pay the agents fees since it is there marketing that has potentialy found you a buyer.

shoe_gal_84

This is exactly what just happened with my partner and I. We were with an estate agency and they were shocking, house on the market for nearly 3 months and not one viewing!
Our neighbours then approached us to say they wanted to buy our house but didn't want to use the estate agent. We then wrote a letter to our estate agent saying we wished to take our house off the market with them (had to give 1 weeks notice, but check your terms).
The neighbours own the house next door outright and wanted to buy our house cash, even offering us a deposit right from the beginning, but I believe we have had exceptional circumstances.
The neighbours offered us an amount, which we accepted and then passed onto solicitor.
It has saved us £2000 + VAT in EA fees.
Our situation was awkward, as the EAs we were on with, were selling the house we wanted to buy.
Once the notice was up and we were off the market officially, we called the EA and said we wanted to put an offer in on a property and said we had sold the house to neighbours who were cash buyers.
Luckily everything has been fine since then and we are hopefully moving next Friday, but guess they could have tried to be funny about it.

Best of luck.

giddypenguin

I guess it all gets a bit confusing with fees, the house we are buying was on with a different branch of our EA company originally, they had a falling out with that EA and signed up to another EA company (interestingly an online EA). But when we made an offer and started getting the legal side sorted their new EA contacted us and told us not to mention which house we were buying as their old EA was still entited to a percentage of the commission and they didn't want to cough up. I really didn't feel comfortable with the whole thing, and it didn't matter as our branch had told the other branch by then anyway - I just wonder if we could have gotten into trouble for not mentioning it.

Hope that story makes sense, don't want to mention EA names just in case!

NEH

googler wrote: »

You've determined their service is 'appalling' in less than a week?

Trust me this can happen. We knew that our Solicitor was appalling in the first week when they said they couldn't handle PDF documents,
communication broke down between the secretary and the solicitor and then the solictor managed to lose the bed in our flat and subsequently told viewers there wasn't one...That was week number 1...

Back to the OP....I think if he saw the for sale sign then you're on a bit of sticky wicket. Did you not ask when you signed the contract how long it was for?