Gazumping

A

Ann-Marie

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Has Anyone Ever Experienced Gazumping When Buying A House?

If Yes Was There Anything You Could Do About It?

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No, there is nothing you can do about it. To reduce the chances of it happening, press your solicitor to exchange the contracts as quickly as possible.
 
It is frowned upon (and given an offensive sounding name) when a seller does it to a buyer (accepting a higher bid from another buyer).

What about when a buyer does it to a seller (decides to walk away from an agreed sale for any one of several reasons). Surely it is equally offensive.

I have come to accept that walking away from a deal is par for the course because of the lack of real committment inherent in our system of booking deposits. In recent transactions, I have had two buyers pull out of my sale, one seller pull out of my purchase, and I subsequently gazumped.

I'm afraid you can frown on us all, or you can join the club until there is some real effort to reform the system of booking deposits.
 
Booking deposits are meaningless where they should be a contract , thats correct.

A sale agreed should progress at the offered price subject to survey and mortgage approval only and if they are preconditions to the offer then that should be allowed as well....so sale agreed means exactly what it sez on the can.
 
If you are doing business with a Homebond registered builder then your booking deposit gives you first refusal for a period of a few weeks, better than nothing I suppose..Most "reputable" builders wouldn't gazump, esp. not in more rural locations, as their reputation would tarnish very quickly. I do work for a builder but I've been a first time buyer one time too so I can see both sides of the equation........biggest problem in this whole area is Auctioneer's , do we ever really know if that "supposed" higher bid they've just had (which beats yours by €5k) really exists..They are also very resistant to regulation.Self regulatory my eye!!!
 
You're dead right it is - I think it's called gazundering in the UK.

It amazes me that there has never been an effort to legislate to clear up the whole house purchase procedure in this country. It would be such an easy win for a government (or even a private member in the Oireachtas) which would take it on. Nobody seems to think the present system works so why won't legislators take it on?
 
Well i have just been through it last week. Put a deposit on a house 2 months ago there was a leak in the extention so no contracts were sent. every week for the last few weeks we were told the contracts were on the way. Was on the internet the other day and guess what the house i had a deposit on for the last two months was up for sale for €30,000 more than what he had agreed with us. It was terrible to find out that way the seller didnt inform anyone that he wasnt going through with the sale. We informed the new estate agent and they didnt care.
 

That really is sickening, the greed and arrogance in the housing market [inc estate agents] is getting beyond ridiculous, if ever a sector needs legislation its this one
 
Thanks for the posts i suppose we were just very unlucky.

I reckon he was just seeing if he could get more money through another estate agent thinking we wouldnt see it on the net and if he didnt get more money he would have just sold it to us i just happened to check myhome.ie and there is was i was just devestated.
 
Oh ye. Are you moved in yet?
Thats what everyone is saying we will get something better. Its just terrible that there is nothing we can do about what he done because we could have had another house only for him stringing us along

And im surprised at sherry fitz stepping on the toes of another estate agents commision just goes to show they are as greedy
 
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Contracts cannot be signed in a purchase chain. I have had a deposit with the auctioneer for over two months but cannot sign the contract because the people buying my house have not signed and the people buying their house have not signed, it all takes time, I have even had the seller threatening to pull out if I do not sign. I would love the security of knowing that the deal is sealed, but as you say it needs to be legistrated.
 

It would be interesting to see how many of the members of the government or the Oierchtas have a vested intrest in the real estate industry , perhaps thats why there is no intrest in solving this problem.

Undrehand dealing and "brown envelopes" seem to be rampant in the real estate and both buyers and sellers are being affected the only ones to profit are the agents themselves.

this is a pet hatred of mine

Mikeyny
 
Ah sher you're half mad anyway, there's nothing new there haha. Feckers.
Oh yeah, *lightbulb* I cursed on it, remember. Oooohhhh, that's why they took it off
 
A sale agreed should progress at the offered price subject to survey and mortgage approval only
Click to expand...

And legal review??
Or is it standard practice to get your solicitor involved before you go sale agreed?
I thought the advantage for a purchaser of private treaty (compared with auction) was that you didn't need to pay for solicitors/surveyors until the sale was agreed - rather than spending all that money to prepare for an auction purchase and then not getting the house on the day?
 
You're right, Damson, but the problem is with the whole concept of "sale agreed". At the moment it's nothing of the sort - there is nothing binding the parties to the agreement they have supposedly struck. It means that one party can be proceeding in the expectation that all is going to plan (and running up associated legal bills etc.) while the other has decided to seek a better deal elsewhere.

"Sale agreed" should mean just that - contracts should be prepared and executed on the agreed basis. The difficulty for the legislators (and one they have repeatedly ducked despite the uncertainty and frequent misery the current shambles of a system causes) is how to tie people into an agreement while leaving people free to withdraw in the event that something unforeseen/previously undisclosed (inadequate title or a genuine survey unearthing an issue the purchaser could not reasonably have expected etc.) occurs.
 
I agree. We were gazumped by a greedy seller a year ago. We were the only people who had offered on the house (and agreed to pay the full asking price). We kind of suspected the guy selling was a bit of an This post will be deleted if not edited to remove bad language as he had excluded the built in oven on the contents list (we told him he could take it with him - he wanted €500 for it). We went to sale agreed and put down the booking deposit with the estate agent and the property was taken off the market/website etc and contracts were to be issued. Approx 3-4 days later we received a call from the estate agent telling us that the guy had decided that he wanted another €5k (because another house down the road was under offer for a price that made him think his was worth more than we had offered). We were to give the estate agent a call the next day to go through what we wanted to do. After agonising we decided not to give him the extra money but I checked before ringing the estate agent and lo and behold the house was back up on the website and, having gotten my sister to call the agent, was being offered for sale. All this before we had given the agent the call to say that we were pulling out and while he still had our booking deposit. The cheque was never presented which makes me think the agent was holding on to see if he could get more money. I pointed out to the agent that it was against the IAVI code of practise to market a property while the agent held a booking deposit against it but he blamed someone else in his office (a patent lie as he acknowledged the fact it was back on the market before I mentioned the code of practise). I contacted the IAVI and they were dismissive, funnily enough. The whole episode really annoyed me and my wife (we had agreed the sale of our house on the basis of the bid being accepted on the house we wanted). The greed of some people is unbelievable, an extra €5k for the sake of reneging on a contract/causing grief for many other people etc etc.

Jack
 
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