I was involved in a bizarre situation last week. A client of mine, let´s call her Mrs. Smith, responded to a property advertisement on the internet for a 3 bed property for sale in Marbella, priced at €195,000. Another Costa del Sol property agent had advised me that he was dealing directly (and exclusively) with a local bank that had repossessed the property and that he had been asked by the bank to find a buyer within an agreed timescale of 3 weeks, of which there were 7 days remaining when my client took a look at the property.Of course, my client feel in love with this distressed property in Marbella, and a deal was agreed at the asking price. We faxed through all the necessary paperwork to the bank and advised them that we had taken a reservation deposit……..and heard precisely nothing back from them. We followed up with several phone calls over the next 48 hours, but nobody within the bank with any power to sign off the paperwork was ever available to talk to us or ever returned our calls.

After the weekend we then made further efforts to make contact with the bank, and all the while Mrs. Smith was becoming increasingly frustrated and concerned that she may be in danger of losing her bargain property in Spain. But how could she lose it? The agent was operating under an exclusive agreement with the bank, so nobody else could surely arrange viewings or reservations to beat our client to the sale.

But the silence continued past the expiry of the period of exclusivity, and we then received a call from one of the administrators within the bank to ensure us that the property had actually been sold. There was no explanation, no apology, no nothing.

My client was distraught and very, very angry.

We have since discovered exactly what happened. It seems that the details of the distressed property in Marbella were circulated to the staff of the bank as part of a regular newsletter, and at fairly late notice, a bank employee decided that he wanted to take a look at the property for himself. So during the same weekend when my client was panicking about losing the property that she had reserved in good faith, the guy from the bank was inspecting the property and securing the deal.

And the reason for the delay? The buyer from the bank had to arrange his flights to Spain and was struggling to get the time off to make the trip. You see, this wasn´t a bank in Spain messing everyone around. No, no – this was a highly reputable British banking institution with an offshore division here on the Iberian peninsula.

It seems that bad manners can be found everywhere.