Buyers left in lurch after ‘sale-agreed’ homes sold to others

One 25-year-old new mother and her partner went ‘sale agreed’ on a house in Dublin in December 2022 with the estate agent, whose firm has offices dotted around the city.

A number of house buyers in Dublin saw their dreams of home-ownership evaporate after discovering that the property in question had either already been sold or had been promised to somebody else.

The Irish Examiner has spoken to several housebuyers, all of whom dealt with the same West Dublin estate agent, and who were all subjects of a lengthy sales process after going ‘sale agreed’, before discovering that the property had either been sold or promised to another party.

Each of the buyers in question paid deposits of several thousand euros to secure the sales.

One 25-year-old new mother and her partner went ‘sale agreed’ on a house in Dublin in December 2022 with the estate agent, whose firm has offices dotted around the city.

“When the house went up I inquired, and he emailed back straight away, which maybe should have told us something. We viewed it, loved it, and went sale agreed,” she said.

The couple were so delighted that they declined to renew the lease on a house they were renting and moved back with their parents, waiting for the sale to be completed.

Seven months later, they were still waiting, having been given a number of excuses for the slow pace of the sale.

Finally, in July 2023, the woman discovered that the house had already been sold to someone else.

“I got a call from a woman I didn’t know,” she said.

She said she was heartbroken for me, that they’d bought the house and moved in that April.

A second woman described how her sales process with the same estate agent in the same area had taken just under three years before she was informed by a friend that a second couple had gone ‘sale agreed’ on a house on which she had already paid a deposit.

At Christmas 2023, the sale process, which had begun in February 2021, came to a head when the 40-year-old woman learned from her solicitor that the contracts for the property were set at a value some €140,000 more than she had agreed to pay.

Again, the sale collapsed and her deposit of €5,000 was returned.

“The only thing I lost out on was time,” she said. “But I don’t know what he’s getting out of stringing people along for three years.”

Neither the estate agent in question nor the firm he works for responded to a request from the Irish Examiner for comment.

The Property Services Regulatory Authority (PSRA), the statutory body with responsibility for regulating estate agents, previously fielded a complaint about the estate agent in question regarding the sale of several houses in 2014.

That investigation took three years to conclude, with a partial finding of improper conduct made and a warning delivered to the estate agent, though no further action was taken.

A spokesperson for the authority declined to comment on individual cases, but said the PSRA has 45 complaints outstanding against estate agents, seven of which have been outstanding for two or more years.

It added that it had closed 67 such investigations last year.