Purchaser in United Kingdom

Definition of Purchaser Or Buyer

A term used in legal work arising out of the sale and purchase of property.

Unreasonable Purchaser

It is difficult to be sure how far the principle that, apart from insurance contracts, the reaonableness or otherwise of reliance on a misrepresentation is irrelevant can be taken. Suppose, for example, I am selling my car and, prior to the contract, I tell the prospective purchaser that the car is amphibious and will go across water. Can the purchaser later claim against me because this ridiculous statement turns out to be untrue, as he has discovered now that the car is at the bottom of the river? Clearly, there may be difficulties of proving that there was reliance in fact, as noted above, but assuming that it is established that the statement was believed by the purchaser (for example, by the fact that he tried to drive across a river), the Museprime approach would give a remedy in misrepresentation. Would the courts go this far? Or would some degree of reasonable reliance be introduced, where, for example, no reasonable person would ever have believed the statement to be true?.

The answer may lie in differentiating between ‘reasonableness’ for the purposes of materiality, and the reasonableness of a person’s believing that the statement was true. The Museprime test can be seen as primarily concerned with the former type of ‘reasonableness’. It is dealing with the question of whether a reasonable person would have regarded a statement of this type as containing information which would be a material factor in deciding whether to enter into the contract or not. In relation to the sale of a house, for example, a statement that a garden fence had been erected three years ago (when perhaps in fact it had been erected two years ago) might be seen as immaterial to the contract, so that the ‘reasonable purchaser’ would have been unlikely to have been induced to contract on the basis of it.

Source: Richard Stone, The Modern Law of Contract, 2013, Routledge, London