Property Auction Fee's and Calculations

jimbog

Rather than a seller paying an estate agent £6K you will end up paying it instead even if you don't end up buying it. It's a scam. Run

GDB2222

You are quite right that it makes no difference at all whether you pay money in fees or money to the vendors. It’s the total that counts. But, that’s on the assumption that nothing goes wrong and the purchase is completed.

Unfortunately, you enter into a binding contract to pay the fees as soon as you win the auction. And the whole point of these modern auctions is that you supposedly don’t need to do any legal work or survey before bidding. You don’t even need a mortgage offer. So, there are lots of things that can go wrong after winning the auction that prevent you actually buying the property. But you cannot get the fees back.

In theory, the auctioneers can keep offering the same property, even though they know that there’s a defect in the title that prevents it being mortgageable. So, that’s £6000 for the auctioneers multiple times on the same unmortgageable property.