What is the committed buyer process

[ElephantGrey101]

A house I am looking at is for sale by the committed buyer process. Has anyone come across this before? They want a non refundable deposit if you make an offer? Is this before survey? I can’t find very much about it online.

Sound like "Modern Method of Auction". Not Touch and Bargepole spring to mind.

I don’t know if this is the same thing or not but when we sold our flat in Central London our buyer paid us a 10k non refundable deposit on a flat being sold for 1.2M. They would lose the deposit if they pulled out for no good reason.
Our estate agent suggested it not us. We didn’t ask it of a previous buyer (sale fell through as they changed their mind). We only asked it this time because we had reason to suspect the second buyer might not be serious. They were serious and proved it by paying the 10k with no hesitation.

That is interesting. I would not pull out of an offer for no good reason but it does make me wonder if the survey is hiding something.

Yeah I’d be a bit suspicious, what would there they class as no good reason?

What if the survey throws up something really unexpected you don’t want to deal with, or a boundary dispute or anything really - who decides if it’s valid or not?

Once you’ve handed that money over that’s it, I’ve never heard of this before and I wouldn’t do it, I just think it sounds really risky.

In my case a bad survey would be enough for the buyers to get their 10k deposit back.

But they would have lost their deposit if they pulled out before getting a survey as the previous “buyer” did

Many years ago I placed a deposit to secure a flat in central london. I’d been through months of being messed around by vendors asking more and gazumped on two other properties and wanted to secure it.

The money is sent from the buyers solicitor to the vendors solicitor btw after the 2 solicitors have agreed the terms of the contract so as long as it is done like this as ours was it is legitimate.

I wouldn’t touch it

It would be good if there was also a committed vendor process, so stop people from putting their homes on the market as a test.