Different experiences with different real estate agents...the good and the bad!

Hello. A week last Wednesday I placed an offer on an appartment. The agent then took me back to the office to formalise the agreement on paper ‘offre definitive d’achat’, asking me how much I would like to offer. I said I would like to offer the full advertised asking price. He then said how much deposit would you like to put down. I said at that once the sales agreement was made I could provide half the notaires fees and the remaining at the end of the process. He said to me that is not what he meant and that he needed at least 5% of the property price to be transfered to the notaires account with 10 days of the seller accepting the ‘offre definitive d’achat’. It was not the way I expected the process to proceed, but I said if the buyer accepted my offer that I am paying the full advertised price then yes it is possible for me to make the transfer within 10 days of the seller accepting my offer.

Anyway, a couple days had gone by and the agent said there had been no answer yet from the buyer (as per the ‘offre definitive d’achat’ they had one week to get back to say if the offer had been accepted or not. On Friday the agent sent an email saying that there was no news from the seller and that the seller had asked him to continue to make appointments to see the property on the Saturday and the Monday. I told the agent it was strange that the seller was asking him to keep showing the appartment when they had an offer for the full advertised amount, after all what was there to be gained when they had an offer for the full asking price from me on the Wednesday before? My understanding is that you can’t accept a higher offer from a later buyer if someone has already offered the asking price. The agent got very agressive and defensive with me when I told him this, saying that he knows his job and business and that if I don’t trust him then I can withdraw my offer. He said that the sellers just want to know if there will be better offers where someone will offer a larger deposit then the 5% which I offered to provide to the notaire within 10 days of them accepting the price. He said that he would provide feedback from the buyer once the last visit had taken place on Monday afternoon.

Surprise surprise on Monday evening the agent called to say that the seller had not accepted by offer because someone else had come along and offered them the same full advertised asking price as me, but the full 10% deposit. The agent said though he had other properties he could show me, (at a higher price of course then the one I put an offer in with). It made me wonder whether because he knows I can afford a more expensive property he is trying to manage his portofolio of properties by matching them with what the client can afford.

Anyway on Thursday I found another property I liked through a different agent. I offered the full asking price. Once I told them that, they took the property off the market without even consulting the owner. Also they asked for no deposit at this stage as that will only come once the sales agreement is signed and you can put down as little as 3%.

Different experiences from different agents…I know which one I prefer!

The tale of the second property seems more in line with the little I understand of the process - the first sounds distinctly dodgy.

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