Anon

Jul 17, 2019

An appalling service from start to…

An appalling service from start to finish. We bought an agricultural property through Peter Clarke Estate Agents in Stratford Upon Avon in 2019. We thought they were the wrong company to be marketing the property from the beginning. The property had been marketed at a residential price and therefore it became very apparent very quickly through five minutes on the planning portal that the property has two legal restrictions one of which is an agricultural tie. This had not been mentioned in any publication from Peter Clarke. I addressed the issue with the agent during which time I dealt with Kerry and the manager Michael. I sent all publicly available information to the agent including all previous planning permissions which clearly stated the property was limited by an agricultural tie. I expected the information to be discussed appropriately and the issue of the price to be dealt with given the agent had not carried out any due diligence themselves which had now permitted the vendor to market the property above its natural value. An ag tie for anyone who doesn't know lowers the price tag by 30%. Michael Hawkins the manager accused us of playing games and very abruptly and sternly suggested to us over the phone that we did not wish to pay the full asking price. Yet we offered the full asking price during our first offer. That took two weeks to get a response. Unfortunately the property value has to be correct as the bank valuation would merely cause problems later on if the vendor and the agent didn't come to an arrangement. I thought Michael was quite rude over the phone especially as the agent themselves had made no attempt to divulge this information. Instead they had their own legal advisors look into causing further delay only to find their legal team agreed with our findings, as I say the information is publicly available and took 5 minutes to find online. Michael never apologised just agreed with vendor. It extended our purchase of the property by four months. All told it took over 8 months to achieve the sale all because of their lack of due diligence. Kerry East the agent who dealt with us, is very nice but completely out of her depth on this type of sale. She was totally sucked in by the vendor and couldn't appreciate the nature of this type of purchase, it's complexities or the deceit being used by the vendor to make our purchase incredibly difficult. Everytime we viewed the property Kerry attended along with the vendor and it was like watching a giddy school girl swoon about over the vendor. On the phone she spoke down to us frequently, something of a common occurrence amongst all estate agents we find, yet they have not dealt with such legally challenging purchases themselves or have any idea what the repercussions of their own actions are. Where we needed support from the agent with dealing with a troublesome and difficult vendor, we received none. It was as though we were deemed trouble makers for finding the necessary legal documents which would have been sourced at search stages anyway. We knew from the very beginning that the propety should have been advertised by Fisher German or Savills and it seemed very strange to be given to Peter Clarke Estate Agents by the vendor, which was purely based on gaining hundreds of thousands more for a property with legal restrictions which would naturally lower the price tag all through the lack of due diligence and care performed by Peter Clarke Estate Agents. AVOID AT ALL COSTS!