Problem Estate Agents - Advice Request

To whom it may concern

I’m not sure if I’m being cheeky asking for advice directly but we have a problem with our estate agent.

We’re about to sell our house and agreed on 1.6% plus vat commission in their usual agreement contract.

We’ve had a far from good experience with them unfortunately and are now loathed to pay them this amount however are unsure if we can reduce their fee since we’ve signed a contract.

Our grievances include:

A promise to ‘get more money’ for our house than other agents, thus verifying why they charge more but then the day after agreeing to sign, dropping the market valuation by £10,000 from £124,995 to £114,995 (though it was renegotiated back up to £117,995) making us feel the initial price was just to lure us into signing

They have not shown any of our viewers through, we have done it all despite stating we would prefer they did.  We stated we could after hours but other times during the agents opening hours all viewing appointments were unavailable meaning we had to do these viewing also

The agent cancelling attendance at our open day on the morning of it stating no one had registered to come (although the address was given in advert so people could have shown without booking) meaning we did it all ourselves

Poor communication and having to chase up feedback from viewers days afterwards despite stating they would inform us the day after viewing

Very few paper adverts put in (probably only two in total over a number of weeks)

Following some confusing and cheeky attempts to renegotiate the sale price by our current buyers from 105,000 to 100,000, once we had agreed on 105,000 the agents sent a letter of notification of sale to all parties stating the sale price was 100,000!!  The buyers then attempted to once again renegotiate down to 100,000 possibly as a consequence of this (although the sale price is 105,000 again)

Taking our property off the advertising sites after the offer which they had advised us not to and we had specified we did not want this to happen due to the instability of the sale

I’m not sure if these issues give us a legal right to renegotiate due to the poor service.  Funnily enough their contract does not state what sort of service they should provide so I’m not sure we can state they have broken it?

Anyway, any advice you could give us would be wonderful!!

Cheers

Anna

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Dear Anna,  thanks for writing in. I will email you back shortly with my recommendations.

If you need advice on how to sell house / conveyancing quotes / how to avoid repossession / sell and rent back schemes or anything else property related, feel free to get in touch.

Email me - editor@theadvisory.co.uk

Happy house sales!

Gavin Brazg (Editor)