Bypassing Estate Agents

johnnyjb

Hi is it possible to skip the agents and save money if you can contact the seller.

Would you run into trouble and complications during the sale or is it a regular process.


Thanks

Doop

Well for starters its the seller who pays the agents fees, so your not saving yourself anything.

Also, the seller signed up with the estate agent to sell their property. The ads were put up by the agent, the for sale sign belongs to the agent. How did you know this proeprty was for sale??

The vendor would be leaving himself open to legal action.

ellejay

really all the ea does is negotiate the highest sale price on behalf of the vendour.

your surveyour and solicitor should be able to find out if there's anything wrong with the property.

if you think there's a better chance of the vendour accepting your offer by going directly to them, then by all means do that.

you've nothing to loose. it's up to the vendour then to decide if they go through the ea or not.

if you read through the posts in this forum, you'll read that a lot of people don't trust and like them. much prefer doing business without them.

you could just stick a note through the letter box, what harm?!!

galah

no harm at all.

we were 'lucky' that when we were looking at the place we just bought, the EA was late - so the seller actually showed us around, and we got chatting. The EA was useless, and late again at the second vieweing, so again we got chatting to the seller, and decided to bypass the EA completely. They were completely left out of the loop, we dealt with the seller directly, they didnt get their full fee, for being incompetent (as far as I've heard, anyway), and it meant we got our house at a decent price (cause I don't think the EA would have passed on our offer to the seller at all, since it was well below official asking).

Joey the lips

You cant afik bypass the estate agent if a contract is in place... In otherwords if a sign is up. If the estate agent finds out about it s/he is entitled to sue the seller for fee's

However. There is nothing stopping a seller giving the estate agent a period of time then if the offer is not in by this time the seller is free to sell it to whom they like

So in otherwords if you manage to get the homeowner to agree to this you might have to actually wait a while to shake on it.

Its something that would not work during the boom but no harm in trying now.

johnnyjb

Thanks for the replies