Am I being ripped off??

Cherries6281

I'm new here so please be nice!

Basically, we have sold our house (well nearly) to our estate agent. The agent has been managing the rental on it for a couple of years now while the property was in negative equity. We put it on the market in May and within a couple of weeks the estate agent offered to buy it. This was a good solution at the time as we didn't want the tenants to move out and have a void period waiting for a sale to go through. The offer we accepted was about £7k short of the asking price so seemed fair too.

Since then we have seen the value of property sky rocket and houses are on the market in the same street for £20k more than we have accepted.

To add insult to injury the agent is also charging us an agency fee (he showed one other person around apparently) of £1600 approx. he says he can't waive it as it's set by the directors, blah blah.

We feel like we are selling short and being treated a little unfairly with the fees but are worried about withdrawing from the sale as his agency manages the tenants etc and could make life difficult for us.

Should we accept it as it is or try our luck for more? Do we have any recourse on the fees?

Oh, extra info we rent the house we currently live in and will probably end up about £2k down in the end.

Any helpful advice would be gratefully received.

jjlandlord

As long as you haven't exchanged contracts yet, you can negotiate or walk away.
For example, if they do not waive the fee, you can tell him that the deal is on only if he pays the fee out of his pocket (ie. he adds 1.6k to his offer), or just that you now think that his offer is too low.

I'm hoping you see that if the estate agent is interested in buying the property he has a major conflict of interest since, clearly, it is no longer in his interest to market it.

Tixy

Cherries6281 wrote: »

The offer we accepted was about £7k short of the asking price so seemed fair too.

How did you determine the asking price originally? presumably not just by asking this one agent?
Did you get 3 different agents round to value the house? and ask them what they would recommend marketing it for both vacant and with tenants?

Cherries6281 wrote: »

Since then we have seen the value of property sky rocket and houses are on the market in the same street for £20k more than we have accepted

Are these properties with vacant possession? unlike yours?

ACG

Your not being ripped off, you were offered a price you accepted it.

If prices have gone up and you want to renegotiate... renegotiate.

The rental issue is a separate issue but just happens to be with the same company so try to separate them. If you genuinely believe you will get £10-20k more then put it back on the market. If the properties are just up for £20k more but not getting sold then they probably are overpriced - but there is not enough info for me to gauge on that front.