Gazumped on Exchange Day - Repo

Gribbit789

Businesses buy properties for numerous reasons. A builder who does house flipping, portfolio investment, developers who see a promising plot.... endless reasons.

I was recently in a bidding war for a probate property being managed by the coop. Last year I almost bought a property from capita and one sold by a building society. They all had different practices in terms of marketing length and how they handled the sale process. Usually they have to market for a fixed minimum period so acting swiftly is unlikely to secure the sale; instead it shows your hand.

Repossessions and probate sales are marketed until exchange. They are higher risk sales and this is made patently clear to all involved.

Surrey_EA

Gribbit789 wrote: »

Repossessions and probate sales are marketed until exchange. They are higher risk sales and this is made patently clear to all involved.

Repossessions legally have to be marketed up until exchange, there is no such requirement with probate sales.

davidmcn

Surrey_EA wrote: »

Repossessions legally have to be marketed up until exchange, there is no such requirement with probate sales.

I don't think there is a legal requirement for public notices etc in repossessions, it's just common practice. The lender needs to take reasonable steps to achieve the best price, that doesn't mean you can't do it in the same way as any other vendor would.

Same legal principle in Scotland, but the norm would be to take it off the market (and then hassle the buyer to conclude missives as quickly as possible).

Bumziggy

Thanks everyone for you comments.

By the way, I am fully aware of how a repo sale works. This post was more towards being gazumped as we were about to exchange. Which I guess is just very unfortunate.

I know the general advice is that it wasn't the time to play hard ball, but the feed back from the EA was that they were considering the high offer.

As a side note, although the bank is legally obligated to obtain the highest price possible, the risks associated with each offer are considered. They could still have declined the higher offer base on our offer being a sure thing. The likely hood is that the money still owed to the bank exceeds 125k hence accepting the the higher offer. if the debt was covered by our 125k, they probably wouldn't have accepted. But I wouldn't be able to make this assumption by jumping straight into a bidding war, I can still increase my offer, and I am still in a better position then any new comer.

With regards to finding out the higher offer, the EA can not disclose this until money laundering/fraud check have been conducted on the person(s) who made the offer. Once these check have been done the public notice is updated. This took 3 days.

Once the public notice has gone up, the EA has told me they can not exchange until the notice has been up for 7 days. I am assuming this will apply to my counter offer?

Smodlet

maisie_cat wrote: »

The problem is that the "costs" of starting again may well exceed the additional £2k so the repossessed party may well be worse off. The duty to get as much as possible for the possessed party is on a net basis. The delay will add interest into the pot as well, so somebody at RBS is either playing silly !!!!!!s or hasn't put the business case together properly.

It's the RBS at the end of the day who are a) A bank and b) The RBS (Right Bunch of Shafters)