help! trustee's control of relationship with estate agent?

essex1966

Quick summary: I'm a discharged bankrupt and we are selling the house in order to pay off my bankruptcy debt (this process started before the discharge). I don't have a problem with this so I'm not looking to avoid a sale.

We now have a prospective buyer at last. She wants us to take the house off the market for a couple of weeks as a gesture of commitment to seeing the sale through, while she sorts out solicitors etcetera.

The trustee in bankruptcy is being awkward about this and saying they won't approve of the property going off the market until we have full details of funding, timescale etc. <i>However,</i> the prospective buyer is quite likely to slip away if we leave it on the market. Given that it has been a tough property to market, I genuinely believe the trustee is not acting in the best interests of the bankrupt estate here.

So, my question is: since it was me (not the trustee) who instructed the estate agent in the first place, can I simply over-ride their concerns and ask the agent to take it off the market? Do they actually have any authority over the precise details of <i>how</i> it is sold, especially given that what I am proposing to do is <i>beneficial</i> to the bankrupt estate?

Thanks for any advice.

TheGardener

Sounds like a tough call. But I don't understand - why would the potential buyer slip away? If the house is sold before she gets organised then its no loss and if it doesn't sell while she gets organised you and she have lost nothing? I think she's being a bit cheeky myself. I haven't heard of buyers doing that and if it was me I'd politely tell her no.


However, she's your buyer - I cant help with the legality of it but I would suspect the trustee has the last call.

essex1966

I agree the buyer is not being wholly rational, but "the customer is always right". I suspect she has been burned in the past by losing at the last minute a property she had set her heart on.

My current inclination is to just go ahead and tell the estate agent to stop advertising it for a couple of weeks. If, as I strongly expect, the sale then proceeds I doubt the trustees are going to complain about that.

If it doesn't I will argue (a) that I was acting with their best interests at heart in attempting to accommodate a buyer for a property that has not exactly attracted a lot of prospective purchasers, and (b) that the track record of the last 14 months or so that it has been on the market shows it is highly unlikely that hordes of other buyers would have appeared in that fortnight.

essex1966

I should have added that the property is jointly owned and my co-owner is not/never has been bankrupt. They agree with me and presumably should have some input into the sale strategy for the property since they have an equal interest to the bankruptcy trustee's.