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Jake Van Der Kamp

Someone in the Department of Justice needs to expand his or her vocabulary, and specifically needs to understand the meaning of the verb gazump.

Gazump is when you agree on a price with the seller of a flat you want and a few days later he tells you the deal is off because someone offered him more.

'What happened?' says a friend when you tell the sorry tale.

'I got gazumped,' you reply.

It works the other way too. You sell your flat, compliment yourself on how much money you made, forgetting that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and then find that the buyer is not answering his telephone when you want him to complete the deal.

It is in this version that the tale has played at its worst since 1997. What used to be small local clusters of shops in many residential districts have in recent years all been occupied by look-alike estate agents. Sharks are fat little carp in comparison to some of these people when they are on the prowl.

One of their tricks is to buy your flat, pretending they are doing it for a third party when they are really taking it on their own books. They will even pay you a deposit for it. Then they wait.

If prices go up, they complete the deal and flip the flat quickly for a profit. If prices go down, they refuse to pay and hire a lawyer to chase you for their deposit on the excuse that there was something wrong with the paperwork and the deal is therefore invalid.

One such sale in your correspondent's block went all the way to the Court of Final Appeal recently, although another went through smoothly as it was meant to do. The vendor was one of Hong Kong's most successful barristers. Some people you don't take on.

The reason that the Department of Justice needs to acquaint itself with these basic practices is that it has proposed the idea of a cooling-off period, a number of days after the signing of a provisional agreement during which buyers can change their minds.

The reasoning is understandable. Property agents are smoothies who are adept at getting their victims to commit themselves to purchases they do not really want to make - and sometimes do not even know they have made. Let's give these victims a chance to think it over again when the agents are not at their shoulders.

But, as so often turns out with new government initiatives, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The problem in the property business is not that the rules on whether you have dealt or not dealt are too tight. It is that they are already too loose. The loopholes are constantly being exploited. We would have nowhere near as many estate agents as now plague us if so many of them couldn't make their living from it.

We have already tried to address an ancillary problem by making the agents responsible for ensuring that their customers have good title, but this is eventually sure to fail too. Property agents are not solicitors. They should not be asked to do solicitors' work.

The basic problem, however, is one that exists in more than property alone. Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is a sound principle of law, but we are increasingly following the lead of countries such as the United States in subverting it to create a system of caveat vendor.

It won't work. It will only tie down our system of justice in endless litigation. We need to get back to that idea of a deal is a deal, not further away from it.

It will undoubtedly mean that gullible members of the public occasionally have sob stories with which we can sympathise. But sympathy is all they should get.

The cost of vain attempts to stop fools and their money from being parted is much too great. If you want cooling off, take a cold shower.



Hell road paved with gazumptions