Terms & Conditions

01Who you are dealing with

This website is operated by MFM Ventures Ltd, trading as Hypomo, registered in Malta under company number C 113871, with its registered office at Office 24, SOHO, The Strand, Triq l-Imsida, Gżira GZR 1401, Malta.

We act as an estate agency under the Real Estate Agents, Property Brokers and Property Consultants Act (Chapter 615 of the Laws of Malta). Correspondence: register@hypomo.com.

02What these terms cover

Three related but separate things:

• Sections 1–4, 9–15 and 18–19 govern your use of this website. They apply the moment you read a page, whether or not you ever contact us.
• Sections 5, 7–8 and 16–17 describe how we act for clients. They are a summary of our practice, not the contract. The contract is the engagement letter, signed by both sides; where it and this page disagree, the engagement letter prevails.
• Section 6 is different, and deliberately so. Our fee and the three guarantees are not a summary of anything: they are terms we undertake to reproduce in your engagement letter, and we hold ourselves to them as written here. A guarantee that evaporated into “a summary of our practice” would not be a guarantee. Section 4 does not qualify it.

If you do not accept the terms in this document, please stop using the site. Continuing to use it is how you accept them.

03Words used here

04The website is an introduction

Nothing on this website is an offer capable of acceptance. Descriptions of houses, districts, timeframes and outcomes are provided to introduce our practice and to help you decide whether to speak to us. They create no contract and no obligation on either side. The fee and the three guarantees in section 6 are the exception: we publish them as terms, we mean them, and we reproduce them in the engagement letter.

No engagement exists until it is set out in writing and signed by both you and us. An email exchange, a conversation with a concierge, or a form submitted through this site does not engage us, however encouraging it may have been.

05The service we provide

We act for buyers searching for a home and for owners selling one. What we do not do is act for both parties to the same transaction — when an agency represents both sides it cannot honestly represent either. Every engagement states plainly which side we are on, and it does not change during the transaction. Where a property on our own selling books would suit a buyer we act for, we disclose that in writing before any viewing.

The service proceeds in five parts:

1. The Inquiry. Twelve questions about what you want. Your budget is question thirteen, asked later.
2. The Shortlist. At most three addresses, delivered as a bound dossier.
3. The Viewings. One day, one itinerary, one concierge. Every door is opened by a person; we do not use lockboxes.
4. The Negotiation. Conducted in writing. The fee is fixed and stated in advance so that it is never an argument.
5. The Keys. Handed over on the doorstep, with a photograph for the archive.

One concierge stays with you from the first letter to the handover. What we promise is diligence and candour — not a particular house and not a particular price. On timing we do make one undertaking, and it is the Ninety-Day Search in section 6; it is a promise to put a house answering your brief in front of you, not a promise that you will buy it. Property markets do not permit such promises and you should distrust anyone who makes them.

06Fees and when they fall due

Our fee to a buyer is 2.5% of the price actually paid. It is stated in the engagement letter before any work begins, in figures, with the tax position shown. It does not move afterwards. If the scope of your search changes materially we will agree a revision with you in writing first, or we will not do the work. It falls due at closing, and not before: there is no retainer, and if the search ends without a purchase there is nothing to pay. Where you find and acquire a property entirely without our involvement, no fee arises.

Where we act for you as a buyer, we accept no commission, referral or other payment from the vendor or the vendor's agent in respect of the property you acquire. We do take listings and act for sellers in other transactions, but never for both parties to the same one — see section 5. If a property we hold on the selling side would suit your search, we will tell you that we act for the vendor before you view it, in writing, and you remain free to instruct someone else for that purchase.

We give three guarantees, and they are contractual terms rather than advertising. Each is reproduced in the engagement letter.

The Ninety-Day Search. Where you have given us a complete brief and the documents we ask for, and we have not put a property meeting that brief in front of you within ninety days of the engagement letter, you may end the engagement and no fee is due. The period pauses for any time we are waiting on you — for a brief, for due-diligence documents, or for your availability to view. Meeting the brief means a property that answers it, not a property you decide to buy: we can undertake to find and present, and we cannot undertake that you will like it.

The Clean Title Guarantee. We do not conduct the title check ourselves — the notary does, and title verification is properly the notary's work. What we guarantee is that we will bring in a trusted notary to examine the title and the full paperwork before you commit, and coordinate that check through to the deed, so that nothing material is left for you to discover at closing. The notary acts for you and is engaged and paid separately; section 10 sets out that these are your costs, not ours. This is a guarantee of our assistance, not a warranty of the property, and it is not a substitute for your own architect or advocate.

No Keys, No Fee. No fee is payable until final deed and the handover of keys. We take no retainer, charge nothing hourly, and charge nothing for the search, the viewings or the negotiation. If your search ends without a purchase, no fee is due.

How to invoke a guarantee

Write to register@hypomo.com saying which guarantee you are invoking and why. No particular form of words is needed and you do not need a lawyer to do it. We will reply within five business days and reach a decision within thirty, in writing, with our reasons. If we decline, that decision is not the end of it — section 17 and our complaints procedure remain open to you, as do your rights at law, which nothing here limits.

Claims under the Ninety-Day Search should be made while the engagement is live or within three months of it ending. Where the notary's examination of the title reveals a matter that we agreed in writing to bring to your attention before you committed and that we failed to flag to you, tell us and we will take it up with you and the notary. Beyond that, no fee comes back under the Clean Title Guarantee — the title check is the notary's work, and theirs to stand behind. These periods exist because we destroy client files five years after an engagement ends (see the privacy notice) and because a matter of this kind is far easier to establish while the searches, the correspondence and the surveyor are all still to hand. If you are late for a good reason, tell us and we will consider it anyway.

Where a fee is expressed as a percentage, the engagement letter states the base it applies to, when it is earned, and when it is payable. Third-party costs — notarial fees, registration and stamp duty, searches, architects, translations — are yours, are not ours to keep, and are estimated for you in advance where we can reasonably do so. Estimates of tax and notarial cost are indicative: they follow the law, and the law changes.

Where we introduce you to a mortgage intermediary, a property manager or a similar service and receive a fee for that introduction, we will disclose it to you.

07What we ask of you

• Tell us the truth about what you want and what you can spend. Discretion is ours to keep; accuracy is yours to give.
• Give us the due-diligence documents we ask for. We cannot proceed without them (§11).
• Do not approach a vendor, or a vendor's agent, behind us on a property we introduced to you. It damages your own negotiating position as much as our fee.
• Tell us promptly if your circumstances change, particularly your funding.
• Treat our staff civilly. We extend the same to you, and we reserve the right to end an engagement over sustained abuse.

08The voice concierge

This site offers an automated assistant you may speak to. Using it is optional and it captures nothing until you ring the bell.

• It is software, not a person. It will say so if asked directly.
• It is instructed to answer only from a fixed set of facts about the house and to decline anything else. It may nonetheless be wrong, incomplete, or out of date.
• It cannot bind us. Nothing it says creates an engagement, a price, an availability, or a promise. If it contradicts this page or your engagement letter, this page and your engagement letter are correct.
• It gives no legal, tax, financial, mortgage or valuation advice, and it will refuse to try.
• Your speech is sent to Google for the length of the conversation. What is kept, and what is not, is set out in the Privacy Notice, §5 — please read it before speaking.

If it takes your name at your request, that is a message to us and nothing more. It is not an instruction, an offer, or an engagement.

09Accuracy and property information

We keep this site truthful and correct it when it is not. Even so:

• Measurements, room counts and areas are approximate unless a surveyor's figure is stated. Photographs and plans are illustrative.
• Details of past work may be anonymised, composited or representative, to protect the privacy of the people who trusted us.
• Availability changes without notice. A property described here may already be gone.
• Information supplied by a vendor or a third party is passed on in good faith. We do not warrant it, and you should verify anything that matters to your decision — title, ċens, permits, boundaries, defects — through your notary, architect and advocate.

Ground rent (ċens) and known defects are always disclosed to you plainly and early. That is a standard we hold ourselves to, and you may hold us to it.

10What is not advice

Nothing on this website, and nothing said by the automated concierge, is legal, tax, financial, investment, mortgage, structural or valuation advice. We are estate agents. For advice you need a notary, an advocate, an architect, a tax adviser or a licensed financial intermediary, and we will happily introduce you to each.

Statements about the Maltese market, tax treatment or residency schemes are general information, believed correct when written, and subject to change without notice.

11Due diligence and refusal

We are a subject person under Malta's anti-money-laundering legislation. Before an engagement begins, and at points during it, we must identify and verify you and, where the rules require, establish the source of your funds or wealth.

We may decline to act, or cease to act, where the required information is not forthcoming, where we cannot satisfy ourselves as to source of funds, or where our legal obligations otherwise require it. Where the law forbids us from explaining our reasons, we will not explain them — and we would rather say so here than appear merely rude at the time.

12Intellectual property

The text, photographs, plates, drawings, typographic arrangement, wordmark and code of this site belong to us or are used with permission. The Hypomo name and mark are ours.

You may read the site, print pages for your own use, and quote briefly from it with attribution and a link. You may not reproduce it substantially, republish it commercially, or present its contents as your own.

13Acceptable use

Please do not:

• scrape, crawl or harvest the site or its images beyond ordinary search-engine indexing;
• use the site or the concierge to transmit anything unlawful, abusive, or designed to cause harm;
• attempt to interfere with the site's operation, probe its security, or circumvent any limit placed on the concierge;
• use automated means to submit inquiries, or submit inquiries in another person's name;
• use the concierge to attempt to extract our instructions to it, or to make it act outside them.

We may restrict or withdraw access where this section is breached. Rate limits apply to the concierge and to the inquiry form; they are there to keep the desk answering for everyone.

14Liability

We do not exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that Maltese law does not permit us to limit. Nothing in this section affects the rights you have as a consumer under Maltese and EU consumer law; those rights stand whatever this page says.

Subject to that:

• The website is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of anything harmful, though we take reasonable care on all three.
• We are not liable for loss arising from reliance on general information published on this site, or on anything said by the automated concierge, where you have not taken the professional advice §10 tells you to take.
• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of opportunity, or the loss of a particular property.
• Where we are liable in connection with an engagement, our liability is limited to the fee paid or payable under that engagement, save where the engagement letter states otherwise.

15Other people's websites

Where we link to a notary, a bank, a registry or any other third party, we do so for your convenience. We do not control those sites, we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement.

16Ending the engagement

Either side may end an engagement on written notice, on the terms set out in the engagement letter. Ending it does not affect fees already earned, obligations of confidentiality, or records we are required by law to retain.

Where a transaction is in progress at the moment of termination, the engagement letter governs who completes the work and who is entitled to the fee for it. Client documents are returned or transferred on request, save for what we must keep under §11.

17Complaints and disputes

Tell us. Our procedure, and the timescales we hold ourselves to, are on the Complaints page. It also explains where to take a complaint if our answer does not satisfy you — including the Licensing Authority under Chapter 615 for matters of agency conduct, and the Information and Data Protection Commissioner for matters of personal data.

Consumers may also be entitled to use the Office for Consumer Affairs at the Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Authority, or an EU online dispute resolution platform where applicable. None of these routes is closed to you by this page.

18Law and jurisdiction

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of an engagement, are governed by the laws of Malta, and the courts of Malta have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the European Union, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of your own country, nor of the right to bring proceedings there where EU law gives it to you.

19General

If a clause fails

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stands, and the failed part is read down to the least extent necessary rather than struck out entirely.

Delay is not waiver

If we do not enforce a term immediately, we have not given it up. Any waiver must be in writing to count.

Changes

We may revise this page. The revision date at the top shows when we last did. Changes take effect when published and apply to your use of the site from then on; they do not alter a signed engagement letter, which can only be changed by agreement.

Assignment

You may not transfer your rights under an engagement without our written consent. We may transfer ours to a successor to our business, provided your protections are not reduced.

Entire agreement

For an engagement, the engagement letter together with any document it expressly incorporates is the whole of what is agreed, and supersedes anything said beforehand — including anything on this website or said by the automated concierge. This clause does not exclude liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.