Your agent may be withholding offers and viewings without your knowledge.
This is mainly for sellers who have instructed large corporate agents, but any agent with in-house mortgage brokers.
Your agent may be withholding offers from you.
Some of the worst offenders will use your property to force buyers to take a mortgage with them before they can view and/or offer on your home.
Mortage brokers are reporting that some agents are claiming, falsely, to buyers that ‘our vendor has required us to find an offer using our in-house mortgage broker as they want everything done in house’. This is clearly not true.
To avoid missing out on offers you would consider, I suggest you email your agent the following. Make sure you edit it as required to be appropriate to the quality of your personal relationship with the agent:
Send your agent this email:
“Dear [Agent],
We have become aware that some estate agents are declining viewings and withholding offers unless in house mortgage products are taken.
We want to be clear that you are not withholding any offers or viewings of our property on this basis.
Please confirm by return that you will communicate ALL offers of any amount to me/us, whether they are made verbally or in writing, regardless of your opinions about the quality of the offers.
[Suggested optional paragraph if you want to be emphatic]:
For any agent to do this would be a clear breach of contractual obligations, not to mention a breach of regulations. We would consider ourselves free to change agents immediately if we become aware that you have withheld any offers from us.
For the avoidance of doubt, we’d like to be informed if there have been any past offers made on our home that you have declined without our knowledge, or viewings requested, that you have refused without our knowledge.
I/we look forward to your confirmation by return that you have received, understood and accepted these instructions.”
Don’t send that email if you trust your agent.
Clarification: If you trust your agent, they don’t have in house brokers, and they are forthcoming with updates, viewing feedback and offers, I do not recommend sending this email.
But if you are tied in to a long sole agency contract that you wish you hadn’t signed, with an agent that has an in house mortgage broker, be aware that SOME of these types of agents will keep your house on the shelf as long as it takes for them to use it to sell someone a mortgage, rather than let it be sold to someone who doesn’t take a mortgage from their in house broker.
#stopthesharks
Watch this whistle-blowing video from a former agent and mortgage broker who explains how the conflict of interest works in favour of the agent over both the buyer and the seller.