I saw a great word in the news today mentioned in this article in the Telegraph. ‘Gazumping‘ (also spelled ‘gadzumping’) is when a potential house-buyer has agreed on a price with the seller and put down a deposit, then someone else offers the seller more and ends up buying the house instead of the original buyer. Here it is in the headline:
Gazumping ‘returns to London property market’
Here it is again in its base form later in the article:
Ed Mead, the director of the London estate agents Douglas & Gordon, told the newspaper his company’s Wandsworth branch had seen one buyer attempt to gazump a rival by £50,000.
Due to differences in the laws surrounding housing sales, this only happens in parts of the U.K. and Australia. Americans are safe from ‘gazumping’.
There’s another interesting word in the third paragraph where Charles Peerless is quoted as saying:
“We had abuse from the buyers because they think the market is dreadful and they couldn’t believe they had been outbid,”
To bid is to offer a price in an auction and to outbid someone is to offer a higher price than another bidder. If you have used an online auction site like ‘ebay’ in English, you will probably already be familiar with these words.
Do you have ‘gazumping’ in your country?
Today’s image is by Svilen Mushkatov