Real estate agency ordered to refund buyer's deposit

A district court has ordered a real estate agency to return a 10,000-yuan ($1,631) deposit to a client after it failed to railroad her into buying an apartment she didn't want, Songjiang District People's Court said Tuesday.

The agency approached the plaintiff, surnamed Wang, at the beginning of the year about buying a 1.2 million-yuan apartment near metro Line 9, according to a court press release.

However, Wang never actually got to see the property. When she went to look at the apartment, the agent couldn't take her inside because the owner was away. Instead, the agent asked Wang to look at an apartment on the floor below because their layouts were identical.

The agent talked Wang into signing an agreement with the agency to broker the sale. She put down a 10,000-yuan deposit for the property.

Even though the deposit was supposed to give Wang first dibs on the apartment, she got word the next day that the owner had sold it to someone else. The agent then offered her a chance to buy an apartment next door to the original, which was two square meters larger.

Wang agreed, but asked the agency not to give the deposit to the owner before she could look at the apartment. While she was away on a business trip, the agency called to tell her that it had handed over the deposit.

After Wang returned, the agency arranged a meeting between her and the seller, but she refused to sign the contract because she still had not seen the apartment.

The agency called her repeatedly after the meeting and threatened to sue her. The agency said she would forfeit her deposit and would have to pay an additional 24,000 yuan for breaching their contract.

After the agency filed a lawsuit against her, Wang filed a countersuit to reclaim her deposit. The court ruled that the agency had no right to keep the deposit because it changed the property it intended to sell Wang without informing her.