So I’m currently in the process of buying my first home and having a bad experience with the estate agents.
NOTE: I previously tried to buy a home using the same estate agent, they were awful, slow and unresponsive the conveyancer they recommended was also awful. In the end i had to back out and lost a lot of money. A year later I have now found my dream home. It’s perfect. Unfortunately it’s with the same estate agent. Anyway my offer was accepted so now I’m in the process of getting the mortgage agreed. I had a call from the estate agents recommending the same conveyancer I had a bad experience with last time. I explained I had a really bad experience and will not be using them this time and will find my own. Also they cost an extra £600 than other conveyancers. When I explained that I didn’t want to use them the lady said ‘I recommend you use them and partially pay for it now, otherwise the seller may receive a better offer and back out of this sale’ IS THAT EVEN LEGAL and can she really get the seller to back out of the sale!? They have been extremely pushy about this and I feel like I’m being blackmailed into using who they’re recommending because they make money from it?
Also they have passed my number onto a bunch of companies trying to sell me their services and I get so many calls everyday whilst working! Any advice????
6 comments
You can use whatever conveyancer you like.
Typically, avoid those recommended by estate agents… they’re only doing it as they get a cut.
The seller might be interested to hear how terrible the estate agent is acting on their behalf.
Ask her to put that in writing to you
She wants her commission. Just say that you have the conveyancer you want to use already lined up and loosing your willing to take the risk.
The seller can legally leave their property on the market as long as they like, and they can back out of the sale at any point for any reason until exchange of contracts. This absolutely sucks, but there it is.
It’s very common for a buyer to request that the property be “taken off the market” once their offer is accepted. That means that the estate agents would no longer be actively marketing it, so it would be marked as “under offer” on Rightmove, perhaps on the sale board, etc, and if anyone rang up about it then the agents would say it was under offer and not book viewings. But they would still be obliged to pass any serious requests or offers to their client, the seller.
It’s reasonable of an estate agent to insist on proof that the offer is serious (eg seeing a mortgage in principle, confirmation of deposit funds, etc) before stopping marketing. That can take a few days.
Now, she might like you to believe that going with their recommended conveyancer would speed up the process, making it less likely that the seller would pull out. But that absolutely does not follow and you are under no obligation whatsoever to use them even if they were any good, let alone when you’ve already had a bad experience with them.
First time buyers are good news for estate agents, by the way, because it means the end of the chain and less that can go wrong to collapse the chain. The only thing better is a cash buyer and there are very few of those.
Stick to your guns, and best of luck with the move more generally.
Use the conveyancer of YOUR choice, not anyone else, becuase in this entire show they are the only person working entirely for you and you need the best person you can get.
I had the same experience. Was told the seller was using one of the estate agents solicitors and they strongly recommended I use theirs too if I wanted things to go smoothly, better chance of seller accepting my offer, increased risk of things falling through if I didn’t etc etc.
Thankfully I didn’t, because the estate agents solicitor the sellers used were rubbish (but then so were the estate agents who between them dragged the process on for 6 months while appearing to lie to me to keep me on the hook along the way). When the final paperwork was sent over to my solicitor my name and address was wrong on it.
Then they had the gall to call me after about three days of my solicitor being given what they needed after months of waiting for them to get their shit together, to “hurry things along”.
Dealing with the estate agent was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life.
If you walk into a shop to say buy a hifi, or a sofa, the sales people are falling over themselves to be polite, helpful, and meet your every need, for just a few hundred pounds. But then with an estate agent trying to sell you something worth life changing amounts of money, it’s like they don’t give a shit and the process is almost hostile (in a subtle passive aggressive sort of way).
I remember my first meeting with them and I asked “is there anything about this property that you would like to know or feel you’d need to know if you were buying it yourself” which is a perfectly valid question imho. Instead of an answer he tried to make me feel foolish for asking it, then proceeded to ramble on about the negative past image of estate agents and how the industry is different now, and how estate agents are now much better than they used to be etc. Only to go on to basically confirm every negative stereotype once the process started (and there were all sorts of things wrong with the place that had obviously been concealed – not that it made a difference to me because I was expecting it to need renovating but in retrospect I think that question hit a nerve).
At the end of the day, you’re talking about paying out tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds. Don’t let them take charge of the situation and railroad you into anything you don’t want, or distract you from anything you do want. You’re the one in charge and can walk away and find another house at any moment so try to keep that in mind (I wish I had more in retrospect).
I approached the situation with an open mind, but in my experience of searching for and buying a house, many estate agents deserve their reputation imho.