Firstly, I recommend a special section for property related could be created here.
We are trying to buy a house in SALE in manchester. However, the experience is very "colourful". We give a offer to a property and the agent called "BERESFORD ADAMS in SALE" said someone give a higher offer two days later. We increased our offer and it was accepted by the vendor--a repossession company.
Then we instructed solicitor and survey. The survey was done on 12am and the agent called me and say a higher offer from a cash buyer was made and accepted at 1pm. We were so angry about it. Because a lots of expenses were occurred. Also we suspect the agent know this offer before our expenses were occurred. I don't believe the timing between our survey and the higher offer just 1 hour later. In contrast, we are badly lucky if it is trueth.
From this case, I concluded there is a few issues:
1. There is discriminiation from the manager of this agent. He tried to sale mortgage service to me. He messed up our purchasing after we rejected the mortgage from them. He also tried to sale this property to a English.
2. The manager called David Busy always lied to us even we found out the secret.
Later, we found another house which was advertised in two agents (one of them is Beresford Adams). But we did view it and make offer via another agent.
Regard this property, this property was repossessed before we instructed a solicitor. However, The Beresford Adams in SALE still told us another higher cash offer was made.
We are looking at home for a while and contacted a few different agent. In general, we understand the estate agent try to get higher commission as they can. However, they are still very different. We found the all of country wide plc is the worst in the manchester area.
We highly recommend you don't go to any country wide estate agents, as least those we have contacted with.
We will let you know forthcoming stories later.
Good Luck for your home hunting!