A client messaged us convinced he’d uncovered a serious breach, and convinced he already knew who was to blame. He was probably right about the first part. The second part is where it gets more interesting.

We got the message on bank holiday Monday morning, with an apology attached for texting on a day off (spoiler alert, it wasn’t a day off). Something had occurred to the client overnight about a property he’d bought a few weeks earlier: if it turned out to be a shared ownership property rather than one he owned outright, he believed the auctioneer had committed a serious breach of material information, since nothing about it had appeared anywhere in the catalogue or the public listing.

He mentioned trading standards. He mentioned the ombudsman taking a dim view. He’d already saved archived copies of the listing in case anyone quietly went back and amended it.

I get a version of this message too many times a year, and there’s a pattern to it. The buyer is fired up, the language is already halfway to a solicitor’s letter, and somewhere in the middle of that certainty there sits an assumption nobody’s tested yet, which is that the auctioneer is the one who did this to him.

Getting to the Facts not the Emotion
“What did it say under tenure?”

“Freehold. That’s it.”