This is apparently quite common. Vendors want to know how much their house is worth, and rather than figuring it out from the last week's property paper they'd rather get (and ignore) an estate agent's estimate, suffer the hassle of several viewings, and then when the offers come in, take the house off the market.

The slight silver lining is that the estate agent is probably as irritated as you are, and may give the vendor a hard time if they try again in the future.

But surely you can get a slightly better valuation than "look at the property pages" without having to actually put your house on the market?? e.g. getting estimates from a couple estate agents, to decide which one to sell your house with?

simont, good luck finding something else soon (preferably something which isn't being 'sold' by timewasting idiots!!).

The offer I put in was significantly lower than the estate agent's asking price, so perhaps he wanted to know what sort of offers he'd really get instead of trusting the estate agent's estimate.

(Mind you, my offer was an opening bid and I'd have been willing to raise it, so if that was his plan then perhaps he screwed himself.)

That's exactly what happened with the flat I wanted last summer, and I'm still regretful about it. Wondering whether to write to her with a higher bid, still 8-( Bastards, all of them.

They could just look at houseprices.co.uk (http://houseprices.co.uk/), which has actual sale prices, not (highly misleading) asking prices and (somewhat misleading) offers.