First day marketing will force agents to breach duty of care, warns leading agent

Agents are in danger of breaching their duty of care to clients if first day marketing for Home Information Packs is implemented as planned on January 1, a leading agent has warned.

Under section nine of the Ombudsman for Estate Agents Code of Conduct, agents’ duty of care is to a seller and when selling their property they must offer suitable advice to meet the seller’s aims and needs.

The source says: “When vendors come to us we should have available, most of the time, potential buyers for their house.

“First day marketing is directly against the interest of our client if we cannot inform prospective buyers about their property until a Home Information Pack is in place.”

The source adds: “The Government has switched off to the idea of HIPs being about speed of sale and is now concentrating on the transparency of the pack.”

From January 1, agents will be prohibited from marketing a property without a HIP.

It means that they are forbidden to disclose details about vendors’ properties to buyers until the HIP is in place, which could, in theory, take several weeks. Agents in breach of this requirement face a £200 fine.

The source fears that professional agents will be forced to lose business by having to pass hot buyers to competitors who may either have alternative properties for sale with HIPs already in place, or be prepared to breach the law.

The source says: “It [first day marketing] would not be a problem if I could trust that all of my competing agents were not going to break the law.

“Some agents may feel that if they only spill some of the beans to a prospective buyer, such as the name of the road on which the sale property is situated but not the full address, then Trading Standards will be unlikely to catch them.”

Christopher Lacy, director of Savills, agrees: “We are very concerned that less scrupulous agents will be breaching the law. The real issue that people haven’t factored in is that first day marketing is positively disadvantageous. There are a lot of clients for whom promptness of action is important.”

But Christopher Hamer, the Ombudsman for Estate Agents, says: “You could say that about any walk of life, that people will break the law.

“But the fact remains that there has to be a HIP in place before agents can put a property on the market and the only way to deal with that is to ensure that prospective buyers’ details are kept on file.”

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