Our £1,000 Guarantee

Why is Our £1,000 Guarantee So Important?

If you decided to sell your home on the open market, then unfortunately finding a buyer is only half the battle. You still need the buyer to actually complete on the purchase at the price they’ve offered – and this is by no means a foregone conclusion.

Many buyers try and reduce their offer during the process, and for a whole host of possible reasons. This is particularly prevalent with cash buyers – but it isn’t uncommon for normal home movers moving up or down the chain to “try their luck” either.

Perhaps their survey came back recommending some minor works – or perhaps major works were recommended. Maybe the mortgage lender changed the goal posts so the buyer needed to reduce their offer.

Or… Maybe the buyer never really intended to pay what they offered at all…

Unfortunately this is all too common – and there’s a name for it. Gazundering.

What is Gazundering?

Effectively, gazundering is an unethical tactic buyers use to force a seller’s hand into accepting an offer they would’ve never considered in a normal situation. A sale is agreed at one price, and the buyer reduces their offer many weeks or months later.

We don’t do this. What we offer is what we pay. And our Guarantee is there to prove it to our customers, and give you peace of mind.

Why would some buyers make an offer they didn’t want to see through?

Getting a house sold is a long, arduous task – and buyers know this. After you’ve agreed a sale there’s weeks of back and forth between solicitors, and it’s tiring and it wears people down.

So buyers know that if they wait for you to go through this lengthy process, and then reduce their offer later on, you’ll be more likely to accept the low price than you would have been originally.

This practice is commonplace on the open market – with investors and cash buyers but also with normal home buyers “trying their luck”. Unfortunately though it’s even more prevalent among house buying companies – who’ve attracted a terrible reputation for such practices in recent years.

 Our £1,000 Guarantee

This is where our £1,000 guarantee comes in - to protect you from gazundering, and to give you the peace of mind that what we offer is what we pay.

How Does Our Guarantee Work?

If you accept our offer, we pay a non-refundable deposit of £1,000 from our bank account straight over to your solicitor, and send them a binding copy of our Guarantee.

The Guarantee states that if we were to reduce the price or move the goalposts during the sale for any reason, then the £1,000 will be released to you to spend as you wish, and you’re free to cease dealings with Yes Homebuyers, and sell your home elsewhere.

Simply put, if we change our offer or move the goalposts, we lose £1,000, and you get it.

 Why would we offer this?

The reason is simple – it just doesn’t happen. What we offer is what we pay, and we want you to know this – and to have the peace of mind that comes along with knowing this.

And the best way to do that is to put our money where our mouth is – so we put £1,000 on the line that you get to keep if we mess you around and go back on our word.

And we’re willing to do this because… We don’t go back on our word. What we offer is what we pay.

 Are there any exceptions?

Unfortunately as with anything there are a couple of exceptions that we’ve had to put in place to protect ourselves – mostly to do with home sellers not disclosing serious defects in properties.

Some properties have serious issues that aren’t picked up during our valuation process, but that get uncovered during our RICS inspection or during the legal work. These are extremely rare – things like subsidence, or defective property titles and so on – and in 9 times out of 10 the homeowner is already aware.

So we’ve had to implement a couple of exceptions to protect ourselves from people trying to profit from our £1,000 Guarantee.

The Guarantee states that if a property is found to be unmortgageable by a RICS inspector or if a defective title is found by solicitors, and if the issues hadn’t been disclosed to us during the valuation process, then the deposit is returned to us if the sale doesn’t proceed.

Issues like these are extremely rare as it is, but it’s even rarer that a homeowner is unaware of them. If your home is suffering from such issues then let us know during the valuation stage, and we’ll ensure that our Guarantee still covers you.

For all other homeowners – there’s nothing to worry about, and this Guarantee offers you a tremendous amount of peace of mind and certainty during the time between agreeing a sale, and eventually completing on the sale and handing the keys over.

Back to How It Works.