“The concern I’ve always had is that if you are prepared to sell your home at a below-market price, in a difficult market when you want to sell quickly,product zebra zm400 you are perhaps not paying as much attention as you should to the small print,” says Peter Bolton King of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics). “And there are some companies who do not fully explain the process.”
An Office of Fair Trading (OFT) report this week found the £900m quick house-sale sector to be “dynamic and innovative” with some businesses “open and fair” in their dealings with zebra lp 2844customers. But in extreme cases, homeowners were seeing up to 53pc lopped off their home’s market price and were losing tens of thousands of pounds to unscrupulous companies, the watchdog added.
The OFT said practices included last-minute price reductions, services apartment hong kong making misleading claims about property values or discounts, and inducing sellers to sign exclusivity contracts with punitive penalties for breach of contract.
The trading watchdog is investigating three unnamed companies and has written to 120 firms warning them to make sure their business practices are up to scratch. Discussions are also under way with firms in the sector on developing self-regulation.
“There is nothing inherently wrong with quick house-sales, in the same way that payday loans in principle are not illegal,” says Jonathan Smithers, deputy vice-president of the Law Society. “They are simply another type of arms-length transaction between a purchaser and seller.
“What is of concern is unregulated practices which take advantage of vulnerable consumers and do not allow consumers to deal with providers with confidence and certainty of the outcome.”
The quick-sale sector represents around 1pc of all UK property sales, with total sales of between £500m and £900m.
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