Agent obligated to submit offers?

greatcrested

The Property Ombudsman Scheme code of practice:

See 9) Offers.

eddddy

proformance said:
We're talking about a 10pc difference from what I think they'll settle for and what we had initially offered though.. So it wouldn't be such a farfetched assumption that the EA would play hardball, blaming the vendor for their inflexibility to boost their commission, would it?

That would be a very far fetched assumption.

EAs don't want to mess about for days, weeks, months in the hope of maybe getting an extra few hundred pounds. That's an uneconomic use of their time.

It's the seller that didn't like your offer, not the EA.

You need to treat the EA a bit more like your friend than your enemy. You want them to help you get your low offer accepted - then it's a win-win for both you and the EA.

proformance

Yeah, valid points.
So then I'm at a loss why it took 1.5 weeks to get any word back that they had submitted the offer - and I had to pester and bug to get it from him....
If not tactics on the EA part, it could legitimately be the vendor dragging heels - perhaps hoping to hold out?

Thrugelmir

proformance said:

So then I'm at a loss why it took 1.5 weeks to get any word back that they had submitted the offer - and I had to pester and bug to get it from him....

There's always time wasters when selling a property. First through the door, super interested. Then a low ball offer. As a vendor I'd do exactly the same. Drag my feet in responding. 

bucksbloke

proformance said:

I just spoke to the agent again. He has now confirmed that the offer was "formally submitted" and "formally rejected" as of yesterday !
Still seems iffy to me though that they dragged their heels for so long.
But I thank everyone for their responses! Some really good rationale in there... It does seem like they dragged their heels because they may have over-promised to the vendor and/or want to keep it on the market to attract more offers and continue to test the water.....

We had someone offer 30k lower on their asking price, we asked them to up it, they went up by 5k, we declined, they asked for us for what we would accept,  and we left them waiting for a decision . We were so far apart it was not worth playing tennis over the price. They came back two weeks later to ask us if we would accept anything else, we said make us an offer. They came for a third viewing and measured up for an extension! 

They reinforced the offer they already made following our previous rejection as they needed the money to pay for their extension. We waited before we rejected them as we had two further viewings and we wanted to see how they proceeded. So sometimes you might be kept waiting because people have other offers or discussions going on. One of the people who cam later ended up buying and we got just below our asking price in the end. 

MysteryMe

An estate agent can be instructed not to submit offers below a certain level by the vendor so maybe that's what happened here. The EA accepts instruction from the vendor not the potential purchaser.
Regardless if you've not heard anything after a few days then assume it's not been accepted and move on. The assumption may have been made that you are just too far apart from what the vendor would be willing to accept to be worth entering into negotiations with.

 

JGB1955

As above..maybe the vendor said 'don't even bother me with offers that are less than  95% of the asking price,,

eddddy

JGB1955 said:

As above..maybe the vendor said 'don't even bother me with offers that are less than  95% of the asking price,,

In theory, they could do that.

But in practice... it seems an unlikely thing for a seller to do.  People view your house and seem interested, but you tell the EA "don't even bother telling me if they offer less than £x".  I think most sellers would be far too curious to do that.

Unless maybe they're some kind of busy corporate seller who's getting dozens of offers per day, and doesn't want to be bothered with the 'silly' ones.  

But if that was really the case, the EA would have almost certainly told the person making the offer - rather than make them wait 10 days, for no particular reason.