To accuse our estate agents of lying?

[Aspenn17]

We have a baby on the way and are trying to sell our house before she arrives. Our estate agents have been fairly average so far, but this morning we were supposed to have a viewing. I was working from home so went at sat in the car to make a couple of calls so I was out of the way for the viewing. My car is literally metres from our house parked on the side of the road. Estate agent turns up, alone, goes into the house for 5 mins and then comes out again alone and leaves. Bit weird I thought, husband calls the office and the same Estate agent says there was a viewing, they didn't like it etc. I go into the office to confront him and say very politely 'this is awkward but I saw you go in and leave alone, if they cancelled, why not just tell us they cancelled?' He swears blind that he showed a couple around and I must have missed them. I KNOW what I saw, there was no one with him but it's my word against his. What do I do? How can I prove him wrong? Can we terminate the contract?

He’s lying. He is an estate agent after all.

Either there was no interest and they invented a buyer to keep you thinking they will get one. Or his potential buyer is an investor who will use your house for BTL.

It doesn’t reallly matter which. Do you want a person who is perfectly happy to tell you casual lies to handle a big transaction for you ? Probably not.

I'd do what a pp suggested and approach it as a 'You lied to us and that's very disappointing' scenario. Don't ask them to prove it. Just go straight in and say what you want to happen now.

Thanks everyone. Your responses gave me the confidence to be a bit more ballsy 💪🏼
We said we wanted to terminate the contract now, he said he needed to speak to his manager who had already left for the day and we said fine, come back to us tomorrow morning or we are escalating our complaint further.

Good luck I hope you get it resolved

Is there an ombudsman regulating estate agents?

Wow, that's really sneaky of them.

Your first step is to speak to the manager - the EA was there which suggests either there was a no show or perhaps he is worried about his job and meeting his targets and made up the viewing? Not your problem and he shouldn't lie, but I'd speak to his boss.

All sorted! He called this morning and actually admitted he lied!! We are out of the contract 👍🏼 Thank you for all of your tips.

Result

An estate agent admitted they had lied. Well done! Was he even sheepish when he admitted it

Not sure complaining to the manager will achieve anything - they probably condone this sort of behaviour

Obviously not, good result OP, of course you should always take a complaint to the next level if you're not happy

He was actually incredibly apologetic. Said he'd been under pressure from his boss about targets but that he slept on it and realised we deserved the truth. Still in shock he admitted it but nice to have confirmation I wasn't loosing the plot after all! We're not going to escalate it further, I imagine he's already in enough trouble, we're out of the contract and that's all we wanted really.

Nope... Just tell him that you are quite capable of counting, and you only got to one person - him. His pants are on fire. Go elsewhere.

we're out of the contract and that's all we wanted really.

Get it in writing.

If you're absolutely certain you didn't miss the viewers, I think I'd certainly change agents.
Some EAs are def. less than honest. One ostensibly very nice and plausible one - who told me while we were waiting to view that his father was a vicar! - went through the charade of letting me view and make an offer - when the property was never genuinely going to be on the open market.
My offer was turned down for a reason that seemed inexplicable at the time, but I accepted it - only to find later via nethouseprices that it had sold for WAY below my offer - they were just going through the motions and presumably a mate/someone at the EA had got it cheaply.

getting
Catch up

That's good news. How awful that he lied like that. What an idiot.