Estate agent £80 to check our identity?!

[winewolfhowls]

Apologies if this has been asked before.

We have just had an offer accepted on a house.

An email from their estate agents tells us we have to pay £80 'legally required ID check on yourself and and anyone else who will be purchasing the property.' This seems to be a third party legal company.

I was under the impression that the solicitor did this as part of the conveyancing process?

Can anyone please advise?

Thanks.

Reed rains charge this each I think. Wouldn’t view another property with them

No it isn't. I think there's a few estate agents trying this tbh.

Which estate agent is it?

@winewolfhowls

I think it's just an extra money maker for them. The checks cost them pennies!
I argued with our estate agent and they just said to lower our offer by the £160 if it bothered us that much!?

Think about it. Why should there be a cost for proving who you are?

I've sent ID to my potential agent and have not paid them anything. He'll be getting five figures for selling my House. He isn't getting £80 for me to say I am BirthdayRainbow🙄

This will be why:

https://propertyindustryeye.com/hmrc-fines-estate-agents-more-than-1-6m-for-aml-breaches/

I just saw a bloke on Facebook complain about them wanting to charge him £60. They have found a way to profiteer from doing something they have been meant to do as part of their jobs from, I think, 2018 - but have largely ignored.

We've had this purchasing through purple bricks, think they charged £50 then after 3 months it puts you on to a rolling contract with lifetime legal for about £8 per month. I had to call lifetime legal and opt out. Still annoyed about it!

I had heard purple bricks mentioned when I was reading up on this last night. Its just shady behaviour!

Is this Romans?

They tried to get us to sign up to a monthly membership with lifetime legal when we sold through them.

I would prefer not to say since one of the words in my username is very close to my real surname, and I do hope to eventually buy this house, plus give the estate agent some time to respond. We are Yorkshire way.

@ItsFuckingBoringFeedingEveryoneUntilYouDie - I was just coming in to ask if it was Romans too!

Had a very grumpy conversation with LL who just read a script and didn't understand the process (in my opinion...). Am selling as executor so explained that we could give executor' info plus the grant or probate etc but that my deceased relative did not have recent utility bills...

After consulting solicitor and even the ombudsman, apparently the estate agent can set any fees they like.
Therefore I had no choice but to pay. Had we seen another house that we liked I would have withdrawn over this but unfortunately there are hardly any houses of any description for sale in our neck of the woods.
However I did feel molified after having a moan with my own lovely and professional estate agent who was very sympathetic. Thanks to everyone that offered advice.

So you paid £60 for that id check?

On here, as I was astonished to see a house for sale through YOPA with a £70+vat charge for an identity check at the point of an offer being accepted. I've never been charged for this before?

Yes, we had to pay! To add insult to injury the sale fell through after the survey too 😭

This should be made illegal, like those rental charges to check references, renew the contract, complete inventories etc as they should be charged to the landlord...

I totally agree!

When was this? Did they ask you go on an online portal too?

Tell the vendor to cover it. It's their agent. If they wont that tells you all you need to know.

Same here too!

@Mel15sa this was back in February

We're buying a house and the vendor's estate agent is charging us £30 per person. I emailed back to say that I do these checks for my clients too and I don't charge them and I haven't known anyone to charge a fee for an ID check. Also, the service that I use, it would cost around £2 for a full ID/ AML check so £80 for this is definitely a rip-off. They agreed for us to just send the passports and they will upload them at their end.