This month’s case study is one of those auction transactions that I meant to last for four weeks but lasted nearly four months! Luckily, it had a happy ending for our client.

It all started in August when a member of our Auction Buyers Club spotted an attractive office block in Barney Estates auction and brought it up on our weekly call.

Here is a note of caution on the side of this story…if you are ever looking at properties in that auction, I’d advise you to be extra careful as some sellers put questionable clauses in special conditions (it’s not an exclusive phenomenon to Barney Estates though but some auctioneers actively oppose this practice while others have a more relaxed approach). Even some solicitors can have trouble spotting the real consequences of some of those clauses.

But let’s start from the beginning. The office block that our client was looking at was a detached building in Newbury with two tenants paying a total rent of £27,000pa plus an additional six car parking spaces. It was offered a couple of times in the auction but it never reached the reserve of £375,000 and then £350,000. Our client made a rather adventurous offer post-auction of £283,000.

But that was not everything. The purchase price is not the only consideration. There were several clauses in the special conditions that required the buyer to pay additional sums of nearly £15,000 in total on top of the purchase price. This was all negotiated out of the contract. Or so we thought! After a couple of days from exchange of contracts, the seller raised objections and said that the auctioneer was not authorised to remove those. But it was too late as exchange of contracts had happened.