Help - Estate Agent mislead on a property purchse which has now cost us thousands of pounds losses

mrginge

Simonr66 wrote: »

lets move on from the supermarket issue as it is somewhat trivial as let be honest the distance to the supermarket isn't what purchasers look at when buying a home.


The Op felt misled by the EA over the fact the house was in a level 3 flood plain and felt he/she should have been made aware of that. It is the EAs duty to have that info and that is one of the questions that should be on a property fact sheet.


Here is a segment from guidelines issued by Powys Council, still relevant in England.


The focus of CPRs is to ensure the consumer is treated fairly. The guidance says unfairness can arise from:

• Giving false or misleading information
• Hiding or failing to provide material information
• Exerting undue pressure
• Not acting with a professional standard that is in accordance of what is expected
• Engaging in banned practices

Other than banned practices the other breaches have a threshold which is – were/are they likely to affect the transactional decision of the average consumer. The average consumer is one who is reasonably well informed:

• The important questions for any court case is whether your act or omission is likely to have an impact on the average consumer, not the consumer in question
• The Consumer is defined as Clients, Potential Clients and Potential buyers or sellers who are not directly your client

One could reasonably expect the average consumer to investigate flood risk using the freely available information already in the public domain.

Davesnave

Simonr66 wrote: »

The focus of CPRs is to ensure the consumer is treated fairly. The guidance says unfairness can arise from:

• Giving false or misleading information
• Hiding or failing to provide material information
• Exerting undue pressure
• Not acting with a professional standard that is in accordance of what is expected
• Engaging in banned practices

The information about being in a Flood Zone 3 wasn't hidden.
The EA didn't 'fail to provide it,' because the question wasn't raised.


You are interpreting the above guidance as saying that the EA should have volunteered the Flood Zone 3 status, but I'm not sure that's what it means.

teneighty

Davesnave wrote: »

The information about being in a Flood Zone 3 wasn't hidden.
The EA didn't 'fail to provide it,' because the question wasn't raised.


You are interpreting the above guidance as saying that the EA should have volunteered the Flood Zone 3 status, but I'm not sure that's what it means.

Under the guidance the agent has a duty to declare all "significant issues or occurrences at the property" now I would say being in a high risk flood zone is pretty significant.

The agent also has a duty to obtain relevant information from the vendor prior too or very early in the marketing process and also declare all relevant information that comes to light during the marketing process.

So the key question here is did the agent know about the high flood risk, did they ask the vendor the relevant questions prior to marketing and did subsequent sales fall through due to the flood risk which the agent must have known about?

Certainly worth pursuing with a formal complaint, ombudsman, trading standards in my opinion as I think the agent in this case has some serious questions to answer under misleading by omission.

hazyjo

The EA didn't inform me when mine was in zone 3, and I doubt they even realised or cared. Some properties may be affected with price, but mine wasn't. No difference at all. I didn't struggle to get insurance, but it was mildly limited (my lender's insurer wouldn't insure it) and slightly higher than average.


If the OP ain't going to return, we're going round in circles as we can only guess as to whether it's a river, whether it has ever even flooded and if it has, how recently, and why they didn't notice it. Might be buying directly along on a bloody canal for all we know. Plus they may be in the position I was where it made no difference, or might be in the same boat (no pun intended) as teneighty where it affected the value greatly.

Davesnave

teneighty wrote: »

Under the guidance the agent has a duty to declare all "significant issues or occurrences at the property" now I would say being in a high risk flood zone is pretty significant.

I'm mostly being devil's advocate here, but I'd agree that if there had been flooding at the property, the agent would be bound by the 'new' rules to state that.

However, without the cooperation of the OP, we have no way of knowing if the designation of flood zone was caused by an actual flood event "at the property" or just in the vicinity.

As people who have tried to use consumer protection legislation may know, this sort of thing can be a minefield. When it happened to me, I was greatly relieved to find that I didn't need it in the end, as the business had clearly broken their own T&C. Prior to that, I was tearing my hair out over interpretation!