We are in the process of house buying/selling and accepted an offer pretty quickly on our current home, things seem to be proceeding well.
Unfortunately at the time of accepting this offer, there was very little on the market that ticked most of our boxes, so we put in an offer on one house and had that accepted.
Fast forward one month and both myself and DH have had confirmation of a slight increase in our salaries and we've seen another house listed on Rightmove that on paper is our dream home. We'd like to view but it's right at the top of our budget (over still in fact).
Obviously ethically this is shakey ground as we don't want to let our current sellers down but when making the most expensive purchase of our lives we want it to be right. So if we like this property more and they are willing to accept what we're able to afford then we will pull out of property 1 and go for property 2.
The slight concern I have is that property 1 was marketed with the same estate agent as we are selling with, and when we previously offered on a different house (with a different estate agent) they said they would need to call our estate agent to qualify us as buyers. Property 2 is being marketed again with a different agent so we are concerned that they will call our agent before forwarding any offers again, which obviously makes things tricky as we wouldn't want our agent to inform property 1 sellers before any offer on property 2 is accepted, as we need to move and if we can't afford property 2, we will still buy property 1.
Is this common practice for estate agents to contact each other to qualify prospective buyers prior to forwarding any offers? I feel like maybe I could prove it with them in other ways (DIP, email from our agent to say we've accepted an offer) but I don't know how much info to let onto them about our position either as don't want to be seen as flakey (which I know that we are, but we want to make sure we're making the right decision). Anyone else been in this situation before and can advise?