Writing this more as therapy to deal with the anger than anything else, as I know we are right, and you guys will sympathise with the situation!!
Situation is: we are FTB in rented accommodation, viewed house for sale with tenants in, negotiated for a month and finally had offer accepted on the basis that we would proceed ASAP, started all proceedings on our part swiftly (survey done within 10 days), contracts from seller's solicitor received after more than a month and following threat of pulling out, our solicitor had multiple queries and it took seller's solicitor more than a month to get back, which is where we are now, with not all queries replied to properly.
Throughout, from first viewing, we asked when current tenants would be leaving. Standard response from EA was "I will check". Second viewing and the tenants had rearranged a lot of furniture, clearly not getting ready to leave but rather settling in even further (been there 3 years I think). Twenty days from second viewing, the EA tells us they have been handed notice, but no indication as to what the notice period is. One-two months you may think. Well, we are now two and a half months on, and we have been told that the tenants have a moving date of a month from now! Shortly followed by urgent emails from EA and seller's solicitor asking for exchange in the next few days. Our solicitor has rightly advised that we should not exchange until we have viewed the property vacant. Have repeatedly told this to the EA. He says that it is the law that the tenants will vacate, which is just a blatant lie (they even have kids so would be even harder to evict!). We haven't even seen the actual notice docs, despite our solicitor asking for them. EA is now making threats saying that the seller will not be happy and will "probably put the house back on the market"... which really sounds ridiculous given the stage we are in. The EA's behaviour is making us think they do not believe the house will be vacated when they said it will be vacated, which further motivates us to wait for exchange! Seriously, how can these people do business in this way? So unprofessional, probably thinking we are FTB and can be fooled. Well, EA from hell, you are very much mistaken!
Is this even ethical? Could we report them to a industry standards board when this is all over? Don't wish anybody else has to deal with this appalling behaviour!
We are not even sure the seller is aware of the very poor advice they are receiving from the EA, is it a big No No to try and reach out to the seller ourselves, saying that we really want to buy but this EA is making it extremely difficult?