Can someone tell me if an estate agent should let a potential purchase into a house, hand them the keys, then leave telling them to drop the key into the office when they are done? No contracts signed?
No they shouldn't, under any circumstances! Who's to say the potential purchasers don't make off with the house contents, or get copies of the keys cut and then come back later, or move in to squat?
I'd sack the estate agent on the spot and refuse to pay a cent, even mention legal action to him.
That said I was left in the back garden of a house I was considering buying and told to pull the front door and close the side gate when I was finished.
Five years ago we were given the keys to a house, in a rural area in the mid west, by an auctioneer, and told to hand them in to a relative of the vendor when we were finished.
Good job we were honest, and handed them back immediatly.This was over a weekend , in the summer, and we could have had a freebie .
If the vendor and the auctioneer have made an agreement to this effect, then fine. But what if there is no such agreement? And we only found out by fluke as we returned and they were still there. We left and came back 25 mins later and they were still there. Eventually after more than an hour they were gone. How many other times did this happen without our knowledge? I agreed with my auctioneer that he would SELL my house? What part of leaving them have free reign constitures selling? Surely this is a ridiculous practice by a supposedly reputable auctioneer? I certainly wont be reccommending them to a friend!!
Slightly related.....when we were buying our first house (new build) we went along to do the snag list. We were told to go to the security hut to get the key for our house. The very helpful guy there gave us the front door keys for every house in the development! He told us someone else had all the back door keys and that if we wanted to get out into the garden we should look for them!!
We were shocked but it worked out quite handy as we could check the finish on a couple of other houses and compare it to ours. At least all of those were empty....I wouldn't like an estate agent to leave a prospective buyer in a 2nd hand house with keys on their own.
When I lived in London (many, many years ago) handing out a set of keys was standard practice when you wanted to view a flat - the agents almost never came with you; some places asked for a deposit of £5, this was more to cover the cost of replacing the keys than anything else.