Reviewing now that we've successfully moved elsewhere. I'm pretty sure that we were stitched up in favour of a "preferred buyer" when bidding for a property. The owner stated that he was open to additional offers whilst the estate agent claimed that an offer was already accepted. We then offered asking price (trumping the "accepted" offer) only for the EA to claim that it was "rejected", we thought something was fishy so we went directly to the owner and they claimed that they had no knowledge of our offer at all! We gave up the ghost after that and purchased a property elsewhere for substantially more (although I'm sure if we offered that amount on this property it still would've been "rejected"). That's an FYI to all the buyers reading this.