Have you been charged a fee to take your property off the market? Email money@telegraph.co.uk and let us know what happened Estate agents are charging buyers thousands of pounds in “reservation fees” to take properties off the market. In one case, published by The Property Ombudsman (TPO) earlier this year, a buyer paid a non-refundable £13,650 fee to reserve a £325,000 property at auction – 4pc of the purchase price. The buyer later pulled out of the sale after not realising how much work was needed on the property – losing all her fees. The property sold a month later for £5,000 more than she had offered. Experts say reservation fees are on the rise as take-up of “modern methods of auction” increases among estate agents. “Modern methods” allow buyers to bid for properties online and then finance their bids with mortgages. But the Property Redress Scheme (PRS), an arbiter for compensation, has also noticed an increase in “reservation agreements” – where an agent charges the buyer a fee to secure an offer. These fees are smaller than those charged in the auction world, in the region of £500 to £2,000 on average. Sean Hooker, head of redress at the...