4 out of 5 Home Movers have Gazumped other Buyers, or would be prepared to do so...

Government is considering plans to require all buyers and sellers to sign similar contracts that could leave both vulnerable to losing vast sums of cash if they pull out.

In Clare and Steven's case, the sale fell apart due to a slight delay on their side, prompting the seller to seek a better offer. 

When they asked for their deposit back, the seller's lawyer said: 'While our clients are sympathetic, they decline to return the non-refundable deposit.'

As the couple had already sold their home, they had to spend Christmas in rented accommodation.

A new survey of homebuyers has revealed that 85% want gazumping to be made illegal after other data shows a property sale has collapsed every two minutes in 2022. Nine in 10 respondents also called for more support from estate agents to help prevent gazumping from occurring. 

Between 1st January and 17th March, almost 54,000 deals failed to make it to completion, equivalent to a sale collapsing every two minutes so far in 2022.

Why do we buy and sell property in a way that seems only to encourage gazumping, gazundering and last-minute panics that leave people stranded and out of pocket? The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government puts the cost of sales falling through at £270m a year. 

Buyers are now beset by delays, inefficiency, incompetency, gazumping and gazundering. And the situation is getting worse. The time it takes from a buyer instructing a conveyancing lawyer to exchanging on their new property is now 90 per cent longer in some parts of the country than in 2007, despite greater digitisation, according to research by Landmark Information Group for The Times.

Reservation agreements, in which an offer is made legally binding, are a case in point. The government cancelled its trial when Covid hit. Luckily one property technology company, Gazeal, continued to offer hundreds of the agreements, helping people to buy and sell £200 million worth of property in the past two years. Now the government wants to know how it was done.

Bryan Mansell, the chief executive of Gazeal, which is used by about 1,000 estate agency branches in England and Wales, is meeting officials from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities today via Zoom. He says: “We have a large sample size and experience of the challenges. I am hopeful it will give them the encouragement they need to go ahead with a trial.”