Estate Agent questionable request

L

lauradryeye

Registered User
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Hi all,

First time posting here..Fiance and myself are in the process of buying a house through a mortgage.The offer was accepted last week and we are sending an engineer tomorrow for a structural survey.
As the house is about 30 years old we do expect the engineer to pick up a few things.
When we met the EA last week to give him the deposit, he told us that if the engineer advises that something needs to be renovated/replaced, the vendor will knock the price down, but that we shouldn't tell the bank about it and just take the full mortgage amount.
The first that comes to my mind is is that even legal or possible that the bank is not going to check what we actually pay for the house??
The second thing I'm wondering is what is the EA or vendor's interest in doing that here? And most importantly should we do it?? We're just a little bit surprised by this "dodgy" request and want to make sure we're not missing on anything obvious here as we are clueless first time buyers..
Any advice would be really appreciated!
 
I'd walk now and personally would never have given a deposit.

Even if the surveyor finds nothing amiss, it would bug me endlessly as to why the EA appears to have information s/he is not disclosing. Presumably these were the client's instructions to the EA and not a scheme of the EA's own concoction.

With all respect to all parties to the deal, it stinks.
 
Although it not as big a consideration as it was years ago but you will be paying stamp duty above what you are actually are paying for it.

Would not involve myself in that nonsense full stop and would walk away from it if the vendor E/A continues trying to make you complicit in this deception.
 
lauradryeye said:
When we met the EA last week to give him the deposit, he told us that if the engineer advises that something needs to be renovated/replaced, the vendor will knock the price down, but that we shouldn't tell the bank about it and just take the full mortgage amount.
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Oh dear, they are still out there. If the price is reduced than it will be a different amount in the contract so you will only be able to borrow based on that.

You've two options, reduce the price to take into account the repair or the vendor does the repair now.

If I were the vendor I'd be very annoyed at the estate agent for this kind of carry on. Why make things messy when there is no need.
 
When we met the EA last week to give him the deposit, he told us that if the engineer advises that something needs to be renovated/replaced, the vendor will knock the price down, but that we shouldn't tell the bank about it and just take the full mortgage amount.
Click to expand...
My guess is that this is what happened.
They had previously gone sale agreed on the house for say €300k.
A surveyor found that there was a serious problem which would cost €30k to fix.
The seller agreed to reduce the price by €30k
The bank lent less but the buyer was not able to afford the €30k to fix it.

So this would be the estate agent's way of making sure that the sale goes through.

My biggest concern is that there is a known and serious problem with the house. Even if your surveyor gives it the all-clear, I would be very worried that he had missed something. I think you should ask the EA for the previous surveyor's report.

And, of course, you keep the bank fully informed of what is happening. Even if you agreed with the EA's scheme, your solicitor would have to be complicit in it as well.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
My guess is that this is what happened.
They had previously gone sale agreed on the house for say €300k.
A surveyor found that there was a serious problem which would cost €30k to fix.
The seller agreed to reduce the price by €30k
The bank lent less but the buyer was not able to afford the €30k to fix it.

So this would be the estate agent's way of making sure that the sale goes through.

My biggest concern is that there is a known and serious problem with the house. Even if your surveyor gives it the all-clear, I would be very worried that he had missed something. I think you should ask the EA for the previous surveyor's report.

And, of course, you keep the bank fully informed of what is happening. Even if you agreed with the EA's scheme, your solicitor would have to be complicit in it as well.
Click to expand...

Good point, Brendan. I couldn't work out why the seller and EA would be suggesting this. Yours is a plausible scenario and all the more reason to be suspicious.

As you have pointed out, your mortgage offer is for 92% of the purchase price of the house. If you go along with this, you are lying to the mortgage company on legal documents and asking your solicitor to do the same. If you have a good solicitor, they will say no.
 
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Thanks all for your advice on this. The house has just been put on the market as it is a probate sale, so I don't think they had a survey done befor (unless the EA is lying about the whole thing..).
I should get an update from the engineer today so we'll decide from there.Either way we have a good solicitor so we'll talk to her about it as well, just wanted to know if this was common practice, which it obviously isn't!
 
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