Have had offer accepted but the agent wants to keep the house on the market. Advice please

[Properguylondon]

Hi there.
We are first time buyers and lucky enough we have had an offer on the property which we like accepted.

Haart is the agency that is selling the propert but they are saying that the corporate that owns/selling are not willing to take the property of the market until the contract have been signed over.

Now that leaves us in no man lands as they can withdraw/ cancel the sale at any time.

Above all, as well as us being out of pocket, we will be emotionally distraught if that was to happen as this is the property that we have been looking for ages.

What is that we are suppose to do?

Go for it and hope for the best or stay away from it?

Your advice is very much appreciated.

This is quite commonplace in some areas. As a seller they might have already have a sale fall through and had to start again looking for a new buyer. Surveys and finances can be reasons for sales falling through quite early on. If I was in your position I would ask the agent to withdraw the property from the open market once you can prove that you have arranged the survey. Having a survey arranged shows that you are a serious buyer as you have spent money. I think at the stage where no solicitors are involved and no surveys have been arranged it is too early to insist that the property is removed from the market.

We had exactly the same experience with Haart in Camberwell.Offer of the asking price was accepted, but they refused to stop showing it and kept it as for sale on Rightmove. Ultimately I sent a note to the seller, who had no idea what was going on, but they persuaded her that she could get more money for the property - despite subsidence... heartbreaking for us and expensive for her. We are now buying through Peterman - wonderful, so they aren't all the same! Advice would be to cancel the survey unless they remove the house from their website/rightmove and do not show anyone - the biggest battle tends to be removing the for sale sign outside the property, which Haart installed 2 weeks after our offer. grrrrr

Bakeoffcake - I have the feeling it may have been the same property!

Not good is it? Yes to finding out what exactly they mean by keeping it on the market. Our EA insisted on keeping ours on the market until the survey was completed and then it was marked SSTC. This was to give a back up plan if anything went wrong with the sale. No viewings were carried out though. Best EA we've ever dealt with too.

Agent told us it wasn't policy to mark our property as STC or take it off the website. We are in London and I think it's partly because they haven't got much on their books. If you took off all the STC property there'd be about three properties. That's Felicity J Lord who I think might be part of Haart and who are very slippery customers, avoid if you can