OPINION PIECE:
A couple of dodgy geezers knock on your grandmother’s door and tell her they’re doing some roof work for the council nearby and they’ve noticed one of her ridge tiles is loose.
‘We could fix it for you if you like?’ they say.
Of course, when they ‘inspect’ said roof they assess that it needs a lot more work and it’s ’dangerous’.
Grandma is worried and agrees to give Bodge and Leggett her life savings of £10,000 to remedy the loose tiles that, of course, aren’t really loose at all.
This is fraud.
Under s.2 Fraud Act 2006, fraud by false representation requires a person to make a representation dishonestly, knowing that it is or might be untrue or misleading, intending thereby to make a gain for themselves/another or cause/expose another to loss.
Would some estate agents be ‘roofing chancers’ if they were not selling houses instead, in that the perils of overvaluing a property in order to hoodwink the seller into instructing them, is no different from the scene I’ve described above?
Placing a false estimate of achievable value on a potential client’s home is malicious. It not only gives false hope to that seller but also leads them to believe they have a higher budget for their ongoing purchase than they really do.
The swindle I’m setting out here also messes with timescales and delays a potential sale considerably. Especially if you imagine that many owners are selling specifically because they have found an onward purchase.
They may go on to spend money on that purchase… survey fees, mortgage booking costs, legal fees etc.
Yet the agent they’ve relied on as their selling expert has bamboozled them. They’ve lied.
The oldest trick in the book is to win an instruction by purposely inflating the actual achievable price then shackling the owner into a long sole agency contract. This is where the deception really turns nasty.
The lie is the bait. The sole agency is the mechanism. Then the repeated calls to reduce the inflated asking price becomes the real grift.
This practice, carried out daily by hundreds of ‘valuers’ is despicable. Yet it’s legal.
It plays with people’s lives and their emotions. It’s dishonest.
Government should intervene to outlaw this charade and to criminalise those that practice it and indeed those that encourage it from Head Office.
In the absence of long overdue licensing for estate agents, if I were Housing Minister one of my first jobs would be to table legislation to hold estate agent fraudsters to account.
Disagree with me. I dare you.
Russell Quirk is co-founder of ProperPR, a property industry public relations specialist
Comments (1)
that is ridiculous
what a load of absolute nonsense, have you seriously nothing better to write about. Agent A values it at £400,000, Agent B £420,000 Agent C £435,000, who would you sell with? You’d probably put it on at £400,000 by the sounds of it sell it straight away and forever wonder could I of got more. Also not many sensible owners spend money on onward purchasers till they have sold, not sure which agents you have dealt with but if your not proceedable you ain’t having an offer accepted are you.