Scotland has some sort of protection law about being Guzumpt I think.
Not really, an accepted offer is supposed to be binding, but in reality it isnât
Exactly. We had a nightmare when moving down here from Scotland. It is not binding until the missives have been exchanged and accepted.
These can be exchanged right up until the day you are due to move out. Bloody nightmare.
Surely you arenât saying that there is no haggling stage ? Once the buyer has completed his legal, surveyor etc bits then surely haggling over price starts ? There are delays. There is uncertainty. This can go on for days. Or weeks. Sometimes the seller thinks that the dealâs nearly done. But it isnât. Sometimes the buyer, after weeks of negotiating, discovers that his lender has added an additional insurance premium to the deal and this breaks the camelâs back. The buyer walks away. The seller is in tears. This, or something functionally equivalent, is exactly whatâs just happened to poor Dave. The moment where
is exactly the same as the moment where, in the current system, contracts and a deposit are exchanged. 5 minutes before that moment, never mind what contracts or promises to buy and sell or exchanges of children or slaughtering of the fatted calves or doing of the magic dance are used to signifiy it, there is nothing except hope. People can still walk away. After the contracting/promising/exchanging/slaughtering/dancing they canât. Pick any symbolic event you like. It doesnât matter which you choose.
VB
true, Iâd take straya with itâs gazillion poisonous insects and annoying accents over scumhampton any day of the week.
But what if you thought the price was OK but didnât realise that the guy stuck at the airport was prepared to pay over the odds ? Youâve just lost 50k because it snowed unexpectedly.
VB
I can never work out why there isnât a vendor pack. This should be standard on houses that are for sale at over ÂŁ100k or so, and should have the searches and survey, which should be structural of the house fulfills certain criteria (age, price etc).
Them there wouldnât be the delays between offer and exchange.
I agree about the searches. But the last time this was proposed the lenders more-or-less said they were fucked if they were going to accept a survey/valuation paid for by the seller. And quite a few sales involve a chain which inevitably introduces delays.
VB
Of course there is a haggling stage. Once the buyer is happy with the searches, surveys, etc, he and the seller haggle, if they wish. What I said was, once the buyer says âI will buy itâ, and the seller accepts said offer, that becomes a legal, binding contract, with both parties depositing the amount into escrow.
You can change your mind, either party, if you like, but you lose your deposit, if you do.
But it is a shit, meaningless contract, with no penalties to either party.
Money talks, and that is the root of all this bullshit.
If the seller lets the buyer get gazumped, he loses his deposit.
If the seller likes to go around, and agree sales on three places, and signs contracts, it means bugger all.
If the seller wants to run off to another property, he loses his deposit.
How long do you think gazumping will last, with this in place?
1 Like
It doesnât snow there. He might be rogered by a kangaroo, eaten by a wombat, buggered by a koala, chased off by a huge spider, bitten by a snake, molested by a possum or delayed by Quantas. If he is that keen he can always bid by proxy or make a prior offer.
We got a huge prior offer on our last house, but as it was a week before the auction, all it did was to set our reserve. There was a certain amount of squeeky-bum time going on during the auction until the agent declared the house on the market (that is, the reserve had been met). There followed satisfying flurry of bids that might have led me to be very smug, save for the fact that Iâm wary of the domestic antipodeanâs ability to remember such behaviour for decades.
1 Like
I think a lot of confusion has crept in here and the last half of your post (the one immediately above) was at cross-purposes to my post.
Iâll try to clarify:
I think you are proposing that the moment when the sale should become binding (at risk of losing a large deposit) is when the buyer and seller say some words (âI will buy at this priceâ and âI accept your offer to buyâ).
I am saying that under current English law the moment when the sale becomes binding is when the buyer and seller sign some pieces of paper (exchange of contracts). From that point onwards the buyer is at risk of losing a large deposit and the seller is at risk of being sued under contract law. Itâs pretty rare for sales to fail once contracts have been exchanged.
My main point is that there is no significant functional difference between these two ways of marking the transition from an informal, uncommitted state to a legally contracted state. The biggest difference is that in your scheme both sides lay down a financial deposit at the point when the contract is formed. In the current English system only the buyer puts down a deposit (but both parties, the seller included, also take the risk of being sued).
In both your proposed system and the current English system one party can be dumped by the other one 5 minutes before things are formailsed. That hurts just as much whatever the system.
VB
I am confused then.
Why is gazumping so prevalent, then? I have not heard of a seller being sued, for selling to the highest offer.
Are you saying that the buyer has agreed a price with the seller, but no contract is in force, so in the meantime, the seller goes off, and offers it to someone else, at a higher price, before the original buyer makes/signs a formal offer?
Is that what gazumping is?
I have just looked it up, and yes, that is the way it is.
Then you sign the contracts, on agreement of price, with the obvious legal protection, for the buyer, of surveys, searches, etc. That stops the seller from offering the house to someone else.
Criteria are specified by the legal types, for the acceptable reasons, for breaking a contract, and both parties are aware of those reasons, otherwise, loss of deposit.
The government has the power to tell them to go fuck themselves.
And my last mortgage involved no valuation apart from looking it up on Zoopla or similar. Itâs an issue that has mostly been superseded by tech since the law was last considered.
Yes. Thatâs what pisses people off. All sorts of âagreementsâ are made. But they are legally worthless - they donât count as contracts here. They fall apart quite often. Men and women propose marriage and the other partner âagreesâ. But neither side is bound by that âagreementâ until they go through with it in the formal ceremony. Tony Blair âagreesâ to let Gordon Brown be prime minister pretty soon. But then he doesnât. Michael Gove âagreesâ not to stand against Boris Johnson. But then he does. Someone âagreesâ to buy your house. But then they donât. The problem is not the law, so changing the law never helps. It just exchanges one bunch of issues for another one. The root problem is that some people are minded to behave shittily. Itâs sad, but true.
VB
They are financial institutions. If they felt that they were being exposed to increased risk by not being allowed to assess the value of debt collateral to their own satisfaction then they would do what anyone who was faced with increased risk would do. They would charge the voters more. And they would explain this to the voters. The voters have the power to tell the government to go fuck themselves.
My last two house purchases didnât involve mortgages on either of the properties in question. I valued the first one by walking around it and looking for trouble. We had a valuation done on the second one because the bulk of the money used to buy it was my late mother-in-lawâs (she wasnât late then, but her dementia was so bad that Mrs VB and her brother were exercising power of attorney and they are the sort of upright people who pay money just so that things are done properly).
VB
All that is required is a white list system with an explicit clause whereby the surveyor takes a duty of care to the buyerâs mortgage provider, who again is on an approved list.
My point about Zoopla is that a bank with which I had no previous was happy to forward shed loads of money on the basis of a Zoopla valuation - there was no surveyor at all. Anyone telling you that they need to use certain surveyors is talking out of their arse, they just want to use a tied company to get more fees.
You shouldnât put much weight behind anything I say on this. The last time I was involved with a mortgage valuation was in the 1990âs IIRC. The lenders seemed to take valuations pretty seriously back then. But they were issuing 90-95% loans.
VB
I guess the other factor is that house price inflation has meant that itâs the land that has much of the value, rather than the building, so it reduces their risk of the building is in poor condition.
bingo
There are several roads near us where the property for sale is an inconvenience to be removed as soon as the land ownership is acquired. Only to be replaced by some cream rendered footballer monstrosity with all the charisma and individuality of a footballerâs wife
Thanks chaps for the kind words and interesting / informative comments in the thread.
Iâve managed to calm down a bit now that Iâve eaten, had a couple of glasses of red, a smoke and an email from the rental person who is, very kindly, going to refund the deposit IN FULL 
(thank you, kind person)
As for the buyers, we still havenât heard why, and I doubt we ever will. They have also let down 3 others in the chain (chain: another fucking reason why the system needs overhauling), the first one being a first time buyer who has probably lost a fair few bob that they could ill afford.
I donât know what the answer is but I like the escrow thing where both pay in but unsure how it would payout if there were genuine reasons to pull out (shit survey, sudden death in the family, etc.). Itâs just that as it stands people get fucked over, it costs them money and there is no recourse.
And weâve got to go through it all again 
4 Likes