Informal Tender - yet another scam to fleece the buyers!

[CuthbertDibble]

Looking to buy a house at the moment and have been trawling Rightmove for the past week or so to see what's around and get a feel for prices etc.

Noticed that there seem to be a fair few for sale by informal tender, no problem, surely that just means there's a date set for final offers and they take it from there.

Oh no, just found out that it also means the purchaser pays the estate agent fees and the agents charge 2% plus VAT. So, not only do we pay stamp duty we're now expected to pay agents' fees too!

Is this happening everywhere?

Basically the vendors pay very low selling fees and its a bit of a drag buyers in to get them on the market. They tried to get me to do it but I went with another cheaper agent.

we had quotes for £1000-3000 pounds to sell our house but for the sale by tender they wanted £200 pounds. sometimes it was flat rate sometimes it was a percentage of between 1% and 3%.

Its to do with the amount of marketing they do etc. We have gone with the smaller cheaper agent though.
Some of the big agents were all into glossy brochures and photoshopping etc. Plus they have teams of people working 7 days a week who can do the viewings for you.
I just want my house to sell so I can get on with choosing my new one!!!!

No extra marketing from the agents I've seen, although one of them was very quick to tell me that I should reduce any offer made to take into account the extra cost.

Seems like it's just a win for the agent, they get a bigger fee (even with the reduction in offer price) and they can stagger all of their deadline dates to even out their sales.