Best and final - period of exclusivity

[Annam12335]

Hi guys
we are going to best and final on a house on Tuesday and there are four other bidders. The sales agent has suggested putting a period of exclusivity before contracts are exchanged to prevent gazumping. Wondering if anyone has done this before and if this request makes our offer less attractive? Thanks!

I would be concerned if there was any reference to gazundering included. If its purely a gazumping agreement then that should only protect the buyer against the vendor selling to another party and therefore not be a negative issue for you.
Is the property a BTL or Holiday home ? A period of exclusivity is more common in a business sale ?

I do find it odd that the sellers agent suggests this extra benefit to the buyer. Very odd in the current falling market.
I think what's really going on is they want to make it harder for the BUYER to renegotiate and that it will also be a gazundering agreement. That's not good for you to all as it may make it hard for you to solve a problem with unexpected survey results, a change in mortgage offer conditions or changes in the market value - should prices fall significantly during the process.
You need to study the suggested agreement or at least a draft thereof.

The sellers don’t need a contract to refuse higher offers, they just need to behave ethically. I assume it will be designed to stop you dropping your offer post survey or in a falling market.

I would be interested to know what the the terms of the exclusivity agreement are. We recently had an EA try to do this with us but we held firm because the terms were awful, I'm really glad we did as we ran in to problems and would have definitely lost the exclusivity fee (which was ridiculously high in our case).