Incompetent Estate Agent - Do we still have to pay him?

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suzyann

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Our estate agent has been useless has anyone refused to pay them their full commission?
 
Re: Incomptetent Estate Agent - Do we still have to pay him?

Did they sell your property? Has their incompetence cost you money? What does the contract/letter you received at the outset say?
 
Their incompetence has lead to us being guzumped and having to pay more for our house than was initially agreed upon
 
suzyann said:
Their incompetence has lead to us being guzumped and having to pay more for our house than was initially agreed upon
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Its his job to get you to pay more for your house and he is not YOUR estate agent he is the vendors.

He is only YOUR estate agent if you were also selling a house.
 
You would really have to give a bit more detail and expand on why their incompetence has caused you to have to pay more for another house-something I would imagine will be fairly difficult to demonstrate.

I presume that they are memebrs of IAVI-have you had a look at their complaints procedure?
 
We are doing both - selling our house ( have had mayjor issues with our estate agent) and buying ( different estate agent)
 
The main reason , is that our sale fell through which cost us may weeks - We had contacted them to query why valuation report was not done and why there had been no update from the buyers - they never took our queries seriously - Having gone sale agreed for over 7 weeks - we had to ring the estate agent to find out that the buyers had fallen through
 
The problem is the time they spent without ensuring that contracts were signed - We contacted them on this - but they did nothing about it
 
suzyann said:
The main reason , is that our sale fell through which cost us may weeks - We had contacted them to query why valuation report was not done and why there had been no update from the buyers - they never took our queries seriously - Having gone sale agreed for over 7 weeks - we had to ring the estate agent to find out that the buyers had fallen through
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So did they refuse to return your calls, or rather, were they not proactive enough in updating you on the situation with the (prospective) buyer?

I would imagine you would have to demonstrate that this led to you being gazumped-I'm not sure is that is possible-surely you could have been gazumped at any stage, regardless?

You could certainly attempt to negotiate a reduced fee in light of your dissatisfaction-but I would imagine they will require some convincing on this issue.
 
We'd the same problem with our estate agent and we actually lost the house we were buying because of him. I took our own house of the market and didnt pay him a cent. It must have cost him because our house was advertised in the paper and on myhome.ie. Didn't feel a bit guilty because he had cost us our dream home.
 
suzyann said:
The problem is the time they spent without ensuring that contracts were signed - We contacted them on this - but they did nothing about it
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They couldn't very well compel the other side to sign contracts-did you insruct them to withdraw your acceptance of the offer at any stage and go to the next highest bidder?
 
When we did contact them having gone sale agreed , it took quite a while to get anyone to contact us back ( always at lunch or something and never answering the phone ) They never once followed through on our sale following going sale agreed - even though we contacted them 3 times to ask them what was going on - We were foogged off with 'it'sall in process' - turns out they had never been in contact with the buyers at all since sale agreed - In hinesight we would be a lot more proactive in putting the house back on teh market if it was taking to long for them to sign contracts - But as we were new to this we believed that this is what we were paying the Estate agent for - hence the 3 calls made to voice our concerns over the time scale..
 
Yes , we now have a new buyer - but the house has been sale agreed for over 2 months with no contract being signed - We are between a rock and a hard place as this new buyer is taking over a week and a half to get his loan pack sent to the solicitor - It was the time wasted by them doing nothing that has caused the sellers of the house we still want to buy to push up the price - they are annoyed that we still havent signed contracts and are nearing putting it back on the market
 
Daily calls to estate agents is the only way to handle the situation. We are at the same point in the process as you and I hound the EA on the phone every day to make sure things are happening. I'm sure they think I am the client from hell but I don't care. I'm paying them for a service and I'm making sure that they do it to my satisfaction.
 
Personally I'd turn up at the office and not move until it was all sorted or some decent progress made. Its very easy to fob someone off with an excuse on the phone, but if they are sitting in your office, looking very pissed off, then its not so easy.

I know someone who did something similar with their solicitor, sale was being dragged out for absolutely no reason and the solicitor nearly lost them the sale due to incompetence, so walked into the office one day and refused to leave until the contracts were given to them so he could personally deliver them to the buyer.

Also gave the solicitor an earful when he eventually got the contracts and also informed him that he would be expecting at least a 50% discount on the fees. It worked..
 
Unfortunately this is the way the system works. If you are part of a chain and the people buying your house has not had the contract signed for their house, they cannot sign for your house and so on to the beginning of the chain. I had to wait 6 months previously, its a nail biting time because nothing is legally binding until the deposit is paid and the contract signed. A lot of trust is involved, and this does not always work.

You on the other hand would not commit a deposit to another house until you were certain that your house was sold, otherwise you could loose your deposit.
 
suzyann said:
Yes , we now have a new buyer - but the house has been sale agreed for over 2 months with no contract being signed - We are between a rock and a hard place as this new buyer is taking over a week and a half to get his loan pack sent to the solicitor - It was the time wasted by them doing nothing that has caused the sellers of the house we still want to buy to push up the price - they are annoyed that we still havent signed contracts and are nearing putting it back on the market
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It's up to your solicitor to send out the contracts for the potential buyer to sign,how do you know this isin't the problem ?It was in my case,although they claimed they had a delay getting the deeds from the bank.
 
We know the solicitor isnt at fault because we have contacted our solicitor , the buyers solicitor and the buyers broker - We have accomplished more doing things ourselves and cutting out our estate agent completely
 
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