Five dirty tricks in today's rising housing market..
As house prices rise everywhere and London booms, gazumping and other familiar problems are back.
[Telegraph]
"The housing market is picking up again, which means the familiar cast of property nasties - greedy vendors, gazumping buyers and the oily agents in between - are rising like ghouls back from the dead. And they are bringing with them the old array of dirty tricks that can turn the homebuying process from being merely difficult into pure hell.
Anecdotal reports are growing of gazumping, especially in property hotspots like London and desirable postcodes of regional cities. With supply short and prices rising, buyers increasingly panic. The backdrop of the Government's Help to Buy scheme - with all the controversy it has sparked in recent days - makes younger buyers as frightened of delaying their purchase (prices rising further out of their reach) as they are of diving in at once (buying at what feel like high prices and when mortgage rates will probably rise).
It's a horrible situation for all buyers who are losing their leverage in what is increasingly a seller's market. But less scrupulous agents are doubtless relishing the long-absent power of being able to whip up a little panic - and profit from it.
All sound worryingly familiar? If you can't quite remember the property landscape of 2006 and 2007, what follows is a handy refresher on the dirty tricks of a housing boom - and how to survive them. .."
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/five-dirty-tricks-todays-rising-100432700.html