My partner and I recently put an offer on our first dream house together. The property was initially up for auction but did not sell. We subsequently negotiated an offer higher than the highest offer at the auction, having been told by the estate agent that the seller would not go below $X. Our offer was accepted, subject to finance etc within 14 days.

After the successful valuation of the house by the mortgage lenders, we had been given a verbal agreement by our mortgage broker that the finance has gone through fine, however, that the lender was suffering a back-log of paperwork and we applied to get an extension on the finance approval time from Wednesday 18th Nov - Friday 20th Nov. We submitted the written request to the agency (in person), having been told by the estate agent that an extension would not be a problem.

We received a telephone call at 4pm on Friday 20th from a different estate agent (same company) as they guy we had been dealing with was on leave, informing us that they had not received any communication from our mortgage broker and that he was unaware of our extension on finance approval.

We immediately contacted our mortgage broker who said unfortunately it was the end of business on the east coast and that our finance was 100% approved but we would have to wait until Monday morning for a written approval. To be fair they have been trying to rush our finance through in 14 days rather than the usual 21.

We spoke to the estate agent explaining the situation, and also that we had been told by the other estate agent that an extension would not be a problem, at which point we were informed that he had not received a copy of our extension and in any case it was only until Fri 20th Nov and about to expire. Also, that he had received an email from another interested party (the guys who placed the highest bid at auction) earlier on that day for an unconditional cash offer of $5000 more than our offer and that he was obliged to inform the sellers, implying that they would not extend our approval for finance until Monday morning and go with the new offer.

Obviously, we are devastated as until the very last minute everything looked as if it would be fine, having received verbal agreements from all sides stating this (and now we are homeless over the festivities-hooray). However, what concerns me is that:

a) we were only informed of the "hostile" (to us) situation just before close of business on a Friday, leaving us pretty much incapable of doing anything to amend the situation. Also if our extension was agreed to the 20th Nov, when is the earliest the estate agent can offer the seller the counter-offer?

and

b) the estate agent disclosed the exact amount and offer of the competing buyers to us.... I did not think estate agents were allowed to do this and does this mean that he has probably disclosed our offer to the competition in order to try and secure and extra money or would he have liked for us to increase our offer at the last minute? It just "smells a little fishy"...for want of a better expression.

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. We understand that without a written extension or written agreement of finance approval we do not really have a legal leg to stand on with regards to obtaining the house. However, if the estate agent acted incorrectly by disclosing to us the other buyers exact offer (and probably ours to them) or did not follow the proper code of conduct we would love to know if there is any way to lodge a formal complaint about this guy?

Thank you!