In June last year, the client Jing Jing (pseudonym) purchased a second-hand house through Bai Yun (pseudonym), an employee of a real estate agency company A. According to the needs of quiet, Baiyun has recommended several houses and took them to see the house, helping them negotiate and communicate with the homeowner, and when quietly asking about the intermediary fee standard, he also proposed a discount fee. On the 15th, after helping Quiet negotiate the price with the owner of an intended house to 418,000 yuan, Quiet no longer replied to Baiyun's WeChat message. On the 19th, Quiet replied that she had purchased the house through Real Estate Agency B on the 16th. Company A believed that Jingjing's move was an act of "skipping orders" and took it to court to demand payment. The court of first instance upheld the partial remuneration claimed by Company A, quietly dissatisfied with the judgment, and appealed to the Anshan Intermediate People's Court.
In Jingjing's view, she did not complete the transaction directly with the homeowner, but entered into a contract for the sale and purchase of the house through Company B, and had paid Company B's brokerage fees, and at the same time, she had not signed a written contract with Company A from the beginning to the end and should not have paid Company A. Does Tranquility have a contractual relationship with Company A for intermediary services? Is there a causal relationship between Tranquility and Company A when it enters into a contract for the sale and purchase of a house with Company A, and does Tranquility pay Company A?
In order to ascertain the facts, the collegial panel of the court added Company B to participate in the litigation as an auxiliary third party without independent claims, and issued an order for the parties to appear in court. At the pre-trial conference, the collegial panel and the three parties sat in a round-table courtroom to communicate and interpret the law around the issues.
After the "round table", Quiet withdrew the appeal and paid the first-instance judgment to Agent A in court.
"Although Jingjing did not sign a written intermediary contract with Company A, it can be proved from the WeChat chat records submitted by the Appellee that the Appellant accepted services such as house screening, house viewing, communication and negotiation provided by Baiyun, an employee of Company A, and that according to the provisions of Article 490, Paragraph 1 of the Civil Code, before the contract was signed, sealed or fingerprinted, one of the parties had fulfilled its main obligations, and the contract was formed when the other party accepted it. The collegial panel explained that if the transaction opportunity provided by Company A played a substantial role in the conclusion of the housing sales contract, Company A's claim for remuneration should be supported by law in accordance with Article 965 of the Civil Code. At this point, the parties have psychological expectations for the outcome of the case. Jing Jing expressed his obedience to the first-instance judgment, withdrew the appeal, and paid the first-instance judgment in court.
Handle one case, govern one. According to the analysis and judgment of trial big data, in the past three years, the courts at the two levels of Anshan City have concluded 133 cases involving intermediary service disputes, of which the number of disputes caused by the client's "skipping orders" remains high. In order to prevent and reduce the frequent and high incidence of similar cases from the source, and maintain market order and consumer rights and interests, the Anshan Intermediate People's Court took the initiative to extend the role of adjudication, and took the trial of this case as an opportunity to put forward judicial suggestions to real estate intermediary companies, industry associations, and regulatory departments respectively for the common problems found in the handling of a case, so as to practice "grasping the front end and curing the disease before it happens" and actively participate in social governance.
At the same time, the adjudication committee also studied and adopted the "Gist of the Adjudication of Cases of the Client's Use of Other Intermediaries to 'Skip Orders'" to promote the unification of the adjudication scale of similar cases in the jurisdiction. Keeping promises is an important support for maintaining the order of market transactions, and judges discover, summarize and refine valuable adjudication rules, concepts and methods from every fresh case they hear. In the process of promoting the reform of high-quality court trials, the parties' sense of litigation experience and gain is truly enhanced.
All-media reporter Zhang Ling