Gazzumped, sort of #socross

[Vista]

I thought this was a thing of the past but I'm so mad I have to left off some steam.

 

My wife and I have been searching for the perfect house for us and the wheeled toys for some time. In April this year we made an offer on a place we really liked and after a bit of haggling it was accepted. Fast forward to August and the deal has fallen apart because the place turns out to have Japanese Knotweed on an adjacent plot of land. Net result is that lenders consider it unmortgageable.

 

Fast forward a few weeks and we find somewhere else instead. The Estate Agent won't arrange a viewing as they have an open house there the following weekend. So we wait, view the place first out of all the people interested, love it and are first in the door with an offer early the next morning.

 

The estate agent doesn't transmit the offer and waits instead to hear from another viewer, who's subsequent offer is marginally higher. Suspicious? You betcha! So we increase our offer to the asking price. Again this is not transmitted to the buyer till much later that day when, surprise surprise, the other offer is again raised to just £50 more than ours. Then without giving us a chance to revise our offer, they're both transmitted to the vendor at the same time and he chooses the other offer. Despite us viewing first and offering first.

 

Rant rant

[The Transplanter]

Thats King slimey estate agents for you 

[mk2 mike]

Gazumping Still appears to be common practice. I just sold my flat and the agent actively encouraged the two interested parties to outbid each other. End result was the flat went for £16k above the asking price (which by the way I wasn't expecting to get in the first place).

 

Great for me, but I'd be fuming if I was the buyer, knowing the agent had hiked the price up on his own accord. It's not even like the agent was on commission, they're getting a fixed fee regardless of sale price.

[Vista]

We could have gone down that road, i.e. bidding and counter bidding, but decided that with the way the estate agent was dealing from the bottom of the deck, we'd just pull out.

[Lightweightsteve]

It's a difficult one (I'm going to poke my head above the parapet here, as I'm an estate agent), as we are legally obliged to put forward every offer and, very frustratingly, most of the time vendors actively encourage the horse trading, as it ultimately gets them the very best price (especially on open days, as you can't cancel the next viewings once you have an acceptable offer).  Moreover, an aggressive buyer will often know this, and try multiple times to outbid the competition by the smallest increment possible (some people will keep upping their offer by £100 sometimes until they get the result.

 

There are a lot of shabby agents out there (some will let the opposition know what the high offer is, which I find a bit off sometimes), but for me, the whole gazumping thing is still one of the most awkward and embarrassing situations that I find myself in even with 15 years of experience.

 

The only advice that I can give (other than call me anytime if you want a bit of a heads-up), is to fight fire with fire - accept that it is cut-throat, set yourself a budget just like in an auction and play it like the competition - when my wife an I bought our house, we ended up paying 12k more than the asking price, but we still love the house 12 years on and don't regret it in the slightest.

[Vista]

Thanks for the advice Steve but as our offer brought the price up to the next stamp duty threshold we weren't prepared to go any higher.

 

Our dissatisfaction centres specifically on the fact that we were denied a viewing, we offered first, we offered the asking price first and each time our offer was withheld from the vendor until the other buyer had had time to amend their offer to a higher amount. The same was not true in reverse. I an half tempted to go back with a much higher offer to either:

 

A. Force the other buyer to pay much more than they want

B. Discourage the other buyer from the purchase just for us to pull out completely later.

[deltamal]

Estate agents mate i guess, that happen a lot with local prime riverside properties......

[GJUK]

 

 

The estate agent doesn't transmit the offer and waits instead to hear from another viewer,

 

I had an estate agent do this to me.

They ended up paying me £2300 after I got in touch with their ombudsman.

 

Worth a call.

 

J