Estate Agent Duties - Buyers perspective?

eddddy

wheldcj wrote: »

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Our estate agent told us on 14th September that not only had our seller had an offer accepted on a house but that this house has had no chain, RESULT! So over the last month or so we have been tootling around setting up homebuyers surveys etc etc.

Then last week when we re-engaged with the vendors estate agent regarding some quotes we wanted to arrange for post homebuyers report building work, after much pushing they admitted that the vendor hadn't had an offer accepted and neither had they had a mortgage agreed (the two may have come hand in hand).

For various reasons including the above we are now faced with a decision to either wait for our vendor to decide whether they rent or buy somewhere else or cut our losses and look elsewhere. In the meantime we face our buyer getting fed up and losing our sale.

Now I know the estate agent represents the buyer and not us but I wondered at what point, if ever, the estate agent should reveal material facts to us as I argue that had we known pre-survey that they were a flakey seller we would have pulled out.

Help..

Hi weldjc

Going back to your original question...

It's probably not best to rely on what the EA tells you. Before embarking on mortgage applications, surveys etc,you could ask your solictor to contact your buyer's solicitor. Your solicitor could write a letter saying something like "We understand that your client has had an offer accepted on a chain-free property, and has a mortgage arranged in principle etc, etc, can you confirm this?" My solicitor always does this.

You could still be caught out if the buyer lies to their solicitor, but hopefully this is less likely. And of course, many other things can still 'go wrong' - so you could still end up losing your survey fees etc.