What exactly is the estates agents legal obligation to pass on offers?

[MandaThePanda]

I often read that estate agents have a legal obligation to pass on any written offer to the vendor. What law does this relate to?

Have a suspicion that an estate agent is not passing on my offers as considers them too low and would like to approach them from a position of knowledge. Anyone know?

They are required to by law, right up until completion.

The vendor might have said they don’t want to entertain offers under a certain amount though, which might be the reason, and that’s ok.

The Estate Agents Act of 1979 is here if you want to read up. It's hard going though.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1979/38

They will be passing on your offers as it is a legal obligation. If the offers are very low then that probably explains why you are not hearing anything back from the sellers.

How would you expect to prove or disprove whether they are being passed on or not? Even if you think the EA isn’t passing them on, which is unlikely as it’s a requirement, that’s indicative of you putting in offers that are way below the consideration level. If you’re offering in the right region they’ll come back with a counter offer and then you negotiate. If that isn’t happening you’re probably way off.
At the end of the day EAs get paid when a house sells, and many often have targets to work with too, so it’s in their interest to make a sale. I think this says more about your offers than anything about the EA.

You say yourself that the offers are too low. What’s probably happening (as happened a couple of times to us as sellers) is that the agent has said ‘We received an offer of X. I have take it I should go back and decline?’.

They will have agreed a price they would consider/negotiate from. The problem with really low offers is that it sounds as if you can’t afford the full price. Even if you eventually came up to a price they’re happy with, there is always the suspicion that you would drop your offer again later in the process.

Why are you offering insultingly low offers?

Legally they have to pass on offers UNLESS the client asks them not to. The seller can blacklist you and ask not to hear any more offers from you if you offended them. They can also set requirements like 'no offers from people who haven't sold yet' or 'no offers under 5% of asking' etc...

Making low offers is a stupid game to play, the EA has no say but why on earth would the seller want to deal with that.

We got notified of an offer but when the EA called he said he'd already told the person offering that it would be rejected because it was too low. So he did pass it on to us but had also basically rejected it too. Which was fine because we'd told them what we'd accept.

Thanks all for the information and comments.