Has Estate Agent made a boob

shazzybee29

hi looking for advise on whether I can trust my estate agent or move onto another one. House has been up for sale since January after putting in an offer for a bungalow which has been accepted. Had a person interested in our house in April who said they were a first time buyer. My solicitors got everything all sorted, all paperwork done and ready to sign contract in June. Week before we were hoping to sign contracts our estate agent phoned us to say that the first time buyer purchasing our property was having to pull out or to sell one of his houses as he didn’t have enough to pay for our house. How this has happened so late I don’t know. Surely my estate agents would have picked this up at the beginning. They say they had done checks but I’m not so sure as this so called first time buyer stated he worked in mortgages and had told us and my estate agents he had the money.
During this time me and hubby had a planned holiday, so we said to our estate agent, they need to get a new buyer ASAP as we were concerned we may lose the bungalow we had put an offer on. Anyway, got back home from holiday and within a week we had a cash buyer interested. We thought great, made sure our estate agents could prove they had the funds which we were told they did have, so process of all paperwork begins again. We are now on verge of possibly signing contracts to now been told our cash buyer wants a level 3 surveyors report which we didn’t mind but when we got the appointment through for the report to take place it was to be a month down the line which took place this Tuesday 28 July. This surveyor we found out our estate agents recommended. But why didn’t they check to see availability before booking ! Me and hubby are very dissatisfied now. We hired our estate agents because they did all searches before a potential buyer came on the scene in order for the sale of our house to go quickly. May as well of not bothered and saved ourselves a few bob hiring a different EA. We did our own research and found a local surveyor who could have fitted in within a two week period. To really top everything up our cash buyer tells us that our estate agents have advised her that exchanging of contracts will take place in September/Autumn. Bl**dy fuming is not the word. We have had no contact whatsoever from our EA giving us any dates. We were hoping to move by the end of this month. No such luck. Has anyone else had issues like the above and if so, what advise could you give me. I’m pulling my hair out panicking that our seller for the bungalow will pull out because of the delays that have occurred (by the way, the bungalow is empty, so there is no chain from there on)

ExEstateAgent

Hard to read your text but I picked out a few points.

A 'cash' buyer will often decide for whatever reason that they want to mortgage a property instead. Take 'cash' with a huge pinch of salt.

Estate Agents don't decide when exchange will happen, that's down to the solicitors for each party. What does yours say?

Buyers and sellers can pull out any time prior to exchange of contracts, for any reason.

eddddy

shazzybee29 said

looking for advise on whether I can trust my estate agent or move onto another one.

Do you mean withdraw from the current sale, terminate the contract with your current estate agent, and hire a new estate agent?

If so…

• Does your current contract have a "ready, willing and able buyer" clause - if so, your current agent might say that the current buyer is "ready, willing and able", and demand their full fee from you.

• I'd guess your minimum contract period has finished - but you probably have to give 2 weeks or 4 weeks written notice of termination. So you can't instruct a new estate agent until after that.

• Or do you mean that you want to stick with the current buyer, but move to another estate agent? If so, that won't really work. As your current estate agent introduced the buyer, you'd have to pay them their full fee. If the new estate agent takes over negotiations with your buyer, you'd have to pay their fee as well. So you'd end up paying 2 lots of estate agents fees.

TroubledTarts

I think maybe the estate agent has been misled.

Perhaps the person presented themselves as a first time buyer and indicated they could afford to purchase it.

Along the lines things like mortgage in principle or proof of funds should have been conducted say by the solicitor.

Sounds like a bit of a mess but not necessarily the estate agents fault they can hook up people to lie detectors and and legal or affordability issues really sit with solicitors and their communication in my opinion.

What has your solicitor to say on the matter? Where are they deflecting blame?

RelievedSheff

September really isn't that far away. Just relax and let the process run it's course.

Buying property is not an instant gratification process, you need to be patient.

You are in a chain so before anything can progress everyone in that chain has to have all of their paperwork in order, these things take time.

Dustyevsky

(Quoted post removed by Forum Team)

Be nice to newbies.

To the OP, I'd say stick with the EA and don't panic. There appears nothing you can usefully do now that will result in a speedier sale, but try to reassure the seller of the bungalow that you aren't the cause of the hold-up. Property in most areas is proving hard to shift, which help in giving your vendor patience!

ButterCheese

Not all delays are under the EA's control. Mortgage lenders for example are known to request stuff last minute. This happened to us. Our buyer's lender said all ok and we planned to complete on a Friday. We hired a removal van as they were in short supply. The morning of the proposed move, we had a call to say that the buyers lender could not complete as they needed a copy of the building certificate for our converted loft room. They had had 6 months to look into this but decided the day of proposed completion would be the best time to delay things.

So we got back to them with written confirmation from our housing authority that said the conversion was done in 1982 and they didn't even issue certificates until 1992. The lender still sent round a surveyor who took one look at the bedroom and said "yeah it's fine".

A week later we moved house

otb666

I feel sorry for the owners of the bungalow dont know why they accepted your offer when you were not in position to buy. On an empty property they will still be paying insurance standing charges on utilities and council tax (which will double shortly) House buying in a chain is a long process and can fail at anytime. For some reason ours failed twice days before completion. Still in the dark as to why people further down chain waited so long to pull out twice. We had wasted 10 months with one buyer and now moved onto another. Just an opinion I have found the whole process unbelievable draining and feel annoyed with myself how i let it effect my life and it is taking up a considerable time of my years I have got left (if that makes sense)

Albermarle

our estate agent phoned us to say that the first time buyer purchasing our property was having to pull out or to sell one of his houses as he didn’t have enough to pay for our house. 

How can a First Time Buyer sell one of his houses?

shazzybee29

Hi thank you all for your comments, they have been very helpful. All I can say is this will be the final time of moving house due to all the stress. The only other way of moving will be either to a nursing home or in a box. Good luck with everyone’s else’s house moves

sheramber

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82085794#Comment_82085794

An inheritance that has not been transferred into his name?