Can a Seller advocate ask a Buyer to pay 50% fees ?

[ctase]

Hi,

I'm in the process of purchasing a property and 2 days before going to the Land registry to make the transfer I got a request from the Seller's advocate that we need to talk about his fees and that he wants me to pay 50% of them (around 500E + VAT). Until now I visited him only in matters that involved the Seller also (getting a draft contract as per Sellers instructions, getting the contract myself to tax office to pay and put the stamp duties, giving him copies of my IDs, etc) and neither him or the Seller mentioned that I'll need to pay any fees to him.

Is there any legal obligation on my side to comply with his request? There is no mention about this in the sale contract or any other agreement I have signed. If I indeed do pay this amount and get a receipt to state his services to me, is there any Consumer Protection organization I can go to to make a complaint?
Right now I'm thinking to stop the process and hire also a lawyer and ask the Seller to also pay 50% of my lawyer's fees, however everything is already arranged with the bank, mortgage, insurance for 2 days from now, so I'd rather avoid all the mess of delaying everything by 1-2 more weeks.

Thanks,
Constantin

[ctase]

Just a few more details, the property is resale, seller has clean title deeds at hand, I've went with him to the Land office to do the title search for any mortgages and it's clean, I've did an independent property evaluation for the bank so I thought I took all the safeguards I needed until this request for lawyer's fees.

[Pantheman]

You are not obliged to pay any seller lawyer fees unless you agreed to do so before hand. Although I think that doing it alone was a mistake.

You are going to spend x hundred thousand euros and you wanted to skimp on a thousand euros for your lawyer to make sure all is well??

Why not just tell your seller, you will pull out if you have to pay his lawyers fees. I bet he will then cover the costs.

Honestly, I think the both of you deserve each other, one wants to save 500€ and risk his thousands and the other wants to gain 500€ with a possible loss of a sale in todays climate!

And why would you have reason to complain? if you agree to pay the money, under no legal obligation, that was your decision. Sorry to sound so blunt, but some people just won't listen.

[Nigel Howarth]

Hi Constantin

I agree with Pan on this - you are under no obligation to pay the vendor's lawyer's fees.

You should (of course) appoint an independent lawyer to represent your interests.

Regards,

[ctase]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for the reply. I talked today with the seller and she will bear the lawyer fees (she was not aware about this request so I suppose it was the lawyer trying to make an extra buck).
Regarding finding an independent lawyer, unfortunately I'm not from UK so can't trust any of the lawyers recommended by the British Commission so I preferred to do all checks myself (there were cases when lawyers said they checked if the property is mortgaged but they didn't, and it takes only 1 or 2 Euros to go to the Land office and ask for it and they will give you the search result in the same day-even the same hour-).

Also thanks for putting up this website and publishing many helpful resources regarding the whole process.

Regards,
Constantin

[Nigel Howarth]

You're welcome Constantin,

I hope your purchase goes through smoothly. It shouldn't make any difference that you're not from the UK, the lawyers on the BHC list should be OK.

Regards,