| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « May | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
24/02/2008 by admin.
It’s easy to become cynical or pessimistic in Estate Agency. Estate Agents have bad press, no doubt about that and in some cases it may be justified, but is it really the Estate Agent who shouldn’t be trusted? Or is it the buyers? Or the sellers?
In this case, we knew from the outset that this particular person wasn’t telling us the whole truth. He offered on one of our properties and as always we ask if they will talk to our financial advisor (is this to try to get them to use our mortgage broker? partly of course, we are running a business, but mainly it’s because an advisor can pick up when someone isn’t sure of their finances.). Our advisor, obviously not able to tell us too much about the conversation, could only say that he didn’t believe the buyer knew quite how he was going to finance the purchase.
An offer is an offer though and by law it has to be put forward to the seller. An interesting point though…. how much do you think an agent should tell their seller? Do you think we should say if we believe someone is as dodgy as hell, untrustworthy, doesn’t have the money etc? Or should we just put the offer forward and be done with it? I believe it’s a little bit of both.
In this case the seller had already decided not to take the property off the market until the survey was booked, which is becoming more common and I cannot disagree with the reasons for doing so…at least you know once a survey has been booked that the buyer has shelled out some money.
Then came the issues. The buyer after being told the property was staying on the market, continued to talk as if he wanted to buy the property. Great. Two days later….still no solicitor details…..four days later….still no solicitor details and no word on his finances…..a week later and in another phone call to the buyer, he decides to tell us that he has decided not to instruct a solicitor or arrange his mortgage until the property is off the market. Now it’s taken a week for him to tell us this and you can work out the conversation we had with the seller….no chance of taking the property of the market, which is understandable.
This went back and forth for the next few days with no end in sight, until suddenly the buyer said he would instruct his solicitor the next day and was organising a survey for the next few days. We could tell this was going to be hard work, but at least it seemed to be going somewhere.
To cut the story short, six days later, no news, no survey, no contact from the buyer. When we finally manage to contact him, he says he has now decided not to buy the property as he is unsure it is the one he wants. To cap it off, we hear through the grapevine that he has offered on at least four properties over the last couple of weeks and was pretending he was going to buy them all!!
This is sadly not uncommon and we are powerless to do anything about it. What do you think should be done about it?
Posted in Munrolock Estate Agents | Print | No Comments »