houses selling yet not being advertised

[explainthistomeplease]

Can someone in the house selling business please explain this to me..
We are cash buyers wanting buy locally. All the estate agents know our criteria, and some are giving us an early heads up, though not an exclusive one.

Twice now (top end) properties have appeared on Rightmove as listed 'Today" or 'Yesterday" and sold STC. I've rung both agents and asked why we weren't alerted. Other agents send us stuff before the particulars are completed to give us a heads up. Yet these properties appear to have had one interested party and been sold quietly.

In both cases the agents have come up with garbled explanations about buyers being there on the spot. I don't understand this. Surely any agent or buyer would want more than one interested party to see a property.

What is going on? And what more can we do? We're in the SW, where I have to say properties arent flying off the shelves at the moment.

IME this happens when the EA will get both sales. I SSTC with an agent who then gave me the heads up on one coming on the market and I offered before it hit RM. As a cash buyer though I would have thought they would be alerting you regardless as you are in the best position possible but then maybe the others are too.

Ok. That makes sense @Fedupofdiets . Except that I have intimated that whoever I buy from will likely get my sale too. Due to an inheritance we are cash buyers and don't need to sell before we buy. Hence we could buy somewhere that requires work while remaining in our own home.
It does seem somewhat odd.

I think what pisses me off most is that I know theyre making up weird stories, just adding to the sense I have that EAs lie!

In my case it happened because the EA had people on their books who had just missed out on similar properties- they brought them round before the property hit Rightmove and they made an offer which proceeded. So my house never even made Rightmove etc at all.

Sounds like for some reason you might not be top of the EA’s list. It could be as others have said that the same EA is selling the house of the other viewer. Or the other viewer could be a cash buyer, so ready to sell really quickly. I don’t know whether that’s your position? Anyway what I would do is maybe go in there in person, explain your position, say you’re keen to have a look at the houses if anything changes and would definitely be interested if anything similar comes on the market.

The seller should be getting the chance of it going to open market, though. They might have got more for it, if you’d been allowed to view it. There would have been competition between you and the other potential buyer. I’d be annoyed with the EA, if I were the seller. It sounds like the market hasn’t been tested at all. Or the EA knows the buyer? Which happens, but is not on.

Ex EA here. One of the other local EAs would regularly get Vendors to sign up with them by saying they’d give them first dibs on any new properties. The rest of us couldn’t understand why people would do this as it means they’d do the same with your property, so the market wouldn’t be tested and you’d potentially sell it for less.

Well yes. I have a suspicion that someone knows someone. Or that they're trying to up their sales for a particular month which might otherwise be low.
We ought to be top of their list. Cash. And local and with something they could sell!

We sold privately to an agent who’d valued it. It was just pre covid so the market wasn’t stupid. We might have gone to open market if it had been hotter. But the valuation was reasonable, we had 3 other valuations. It saved us estate agent fees and, crucially for us, having to have viewings. A different estate agent rang us with a property about to go on the market and we were first in, so it was on the website but only briefly….

if you are looking for renovation project it’s more like there are arrangements with local builders….who get first dibs.

You sold privately TO an agent? Or the agent valued it and you sold privately?

And we're open to any property. We can renovate but don't need to. In fact the two that Sold STC weren't doer uppers.

It's strange and opaque!

Do these estate agents offer mortgages as part of their services?

this rings true.
I had a terrible experience with trying to buy a house in a midlands city years ago. Had already put my house in London on the market ,with a london agent of course. Houses I would have been interested in were consistently never presented to me. Or anyone else much as far as I could see due to the sheer speed of sales.
I well remember my initial meeting/interview with one agent. Had the distinct impression that they were rather pee'ed off that I wouldn't be (couldn't) selling my house through them, and nor was I interested in the financial products they wanted to sell me - I was sorted on that front. Had the idea I was of little interest to them.
I developed the impression that, yes, they wanted a chain that they were involved in to the max so that when the sale/s went through the EA slot machine spat and spat for them. And also came to the conclusion that a fair few estate agents think that buyers and sellers are just caretaking THEIR houses for them. They are the estate agent's houses to profit from.
Sorry, but the experience rather soured my view of them. It became so bad that I contemplated cycling the local streets I was interested in and leaflet dropping houses myself.
In the end the sods did me a good turn - returned to London - I did lose out due to a gap between selling in london returning in a rising market but found a good yet to be improved area and tapped in to a mega boom in London property prices.

We bought our house when it wasn’t advertised. In our case, the seller wanted a very straightforward sale without doing loads of viewings so when I’d spoken to the agent less than 24 hours previously I was sent the details we viewed an hour later and offered on the spot. We did get it for less than market price, which the seller was aware of. No idea why the agent chose us to send it to.

We live in an area on the coast that’s prime second home territory. There are property search companies that are very close with the agents and ALWAYS get the first viewings on properties.

They usually represent very wealthy cash buyers and sometimes the sale goes through without the buyer even seeing it in person.

It also means that Joe Public misses out.

Whereabouts in SW as sounds very similar to an EA we dealt with in SW.

@Daffodillyb they were high end Truro estate agents. But we're looking south Cornish coast.

I’ll pm you as it might be who we used then!