Conditional selling - your views wanted

Conditional selling is widespread. Just last week an inexperienced first time buyer casually dropped into our conversation that the estate agent was insisting he sit down with their in-house mortgage advisor in order to view the property. It's a particularly common practise with first time buyers, because they know no better. It's detrimental to the vendor (who they're supposed to be representing), the prospective buyer, and the mortgage advisor they're stealing business from. It's appalling how EA's can still get away this nonsense. Much tougher regulation is long overdue, including company fines, and the legal requirement for EA's to tell all potential buyers they don't need to use their advisor. Both verbally and in-store signage.

Posts from broker on social media would suggest it’s still happening, but maybe less than it was earlier in the year; there has been a lot of press around the issue and that’s helped educate those working in this market of the code of conduct estate agents are supposed to be following; which basically tells them any kind of conditional selling practices are a big no no. Mortgage industry trade bodies have been briefing their members on the rules and regulations around this issue and have advised brokers to direct their clients to Trading Standards to make complaints, as the public body with the mandate to take action. However, any mortgage industry body can only connect with it’s own membership, so it’s preaching to converted; ideally we need the various estate agent bodies to be communicating the rules to their members to ensure the widest audience of market players is reached and real change can happen.

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