UKC

Since my Dad's house has been on the market they have created 'promotional materials' (photos and floorplan) which has a non-refundable charge of £150, which seems reasonable.

Apart from that: 

They've put the house on the usual websites, seems like anyone with 5 minutes could do that.

They've organised about 5 viewings, which is something I would be happy to do. 

Supposedly they vet the people viewing, but so far they've wasted over two months of our time with a buyer from another country who used a proxy to view the house, made an offer, took the house off the market, got the solicitors involved and then after some 'tax issues', basically ghosted us. A couple viewed it several weeks ago, stated some intention to buy but now have to go and try to get a mortgage and to date haven't even made an offer - don't they know what their budget is?!

Why on earth do estate agents feel like they deserve THREE TIMES what the solicitors will get, when it's the solicitors that will do all the real work like truly vetting the buyers, checking our credentials, organising contracts, solving legal issues, transferring money etc. 

As far as I can tell they are middlemen from a bygone age where people didn't have the ability to simply find a house on the web. 

Estate agents are worse than map cases and almost as bad as rucksack covers.

I used an estate agent for my last house sale and worth every penny. Dealt with all the problems and got more for the house than I would have accepted. Local knowledge.

The estate agent must have put the offer to your dad, I think they are obliged to pass on all offers. It would have been your Dad's decision to take the house off the market having been told the circumstances. If he hadn't wanted to accept an offer through a proxy then he should not have.

I would agree that the whole house buying process is needlessly complicated, time consuming and expensive

Isn't cutting out all of the extras the USP of purple bricks? I viewed a few houses marketed by them where the seller was the one showing me around, way more informative than the random person from the office.

The whole industry is old fashioned, inefficient and should be overhauled to stop the cowboys.

Don't complain too much. Over here (Canada and US) the fees are 6:4:2. That's 6% for the 1st $100,000, 4% for the 2nd and 2% for everything else.  And they really do f**k all. You can try to list yourself but then you will be shut out by all of the Realtors who won't show their clients your house.

They put it on Rightmove and Zoopla. You won't sell it without being on there, and to prop up the racket they only let insiders list on there. That's all they do. Badly, with typos and poor grammar. For thousands of pounds. 

Sometimes, if you're really lucky, they fix issues in a chain and make things go smoothly. But if they weren't there a good solicitor would cope. 

Estate agents shouldn't be a thing any more. You wouldn't invent them today. Someone suggested Strike in a similar threads not long ago. Something like that needs to take off and destroy the monopoly. 

Must be ripe for some disruptive technology along the lines of Rightmove but bypassing the realtors.

I'm surprised such a thing hasn't taken off already. Has there been some element of lobbying from the realtors to make it a legal requirement to go through them?

We were due to complete on our new house just before lockdown back in March. A buy to let investor was buying our old place and all was well. Then we all got locked up, and the investor got cold feet and pulled out once we were released in Summer. Our new house owners were pushing us and we were pushing our estate agent. Multiple calls made over a couple of weeks, promises of loads of interest but never any viewings. In the end we managed to rejig the finances and keep the old house as a let and future asset. When we called to tell them to take it off the market, they somehow had the brass neck to ask if they could market it for us! A swift no was given, and we rented it out on Open Rent which has been superb. The first lady who came to see it, took it. But not before telling us how she'd been trying to go and see one of the properties the agent was advertising for letting out, but hadn't been able to get through. So she decided to call in to the office on the way to see ours. She could see staff were in, desks occupied so decided to call from the car, again it went unanswered. So she walked in and confronted them. Apparently they were highly embarrassed... 

F***ing crooks!

I'm slightly surprised, now it has the sway, that Rightmove doesn't take "DIY sale" type listings direct (which would pretty much put Purplebricks out of business, as their USP is basically that - a listing on Rightmove and DIY the rest).  I can see why it didn't do that early on because they wouldn't have got the estate agents as customers, but now everyone buying a house goes there first they could surely do that, because any estate agency that doesn't list there is not going to sell anywhere near as many houses.  If they needed to set up a subsidiary estate agency to tick a box I'm sure they would be perfectly capable of that.

This thread comes around periodically. 

Personally I think estate agents are well worth it whether buying or selling. There is plenty of choice so its hardly a monopoly market. And of course if you want to duck out altogether its not illegal to ignore them and have a go at selling it yourself. Best of luck though. 

Solicitors on the other hand......don't get me started...

Other examples of great service I had from estate agents:

- floorplans that didn't match the actual number of rooms when I went to go and see the house

- "double bedrooms" where I could span from one wall to the opposite wall with bent arms. I am not a giant with a massive ape index

- a "bedroom" that was so small that the door could not open/close if there was a single bed in there with no other furniture.

- didn't know whether a property was leasehold or freehold

- for leasehold properties, didn't know the length of the lease, or the cost of the ground rent or service charge and refused to find them out*

- floorplan shows a garage. Where is the garage?

- Didn't bother to turn up for a viewing. Didn't call or send a message to say they weren't coming. The owner agreed to show me round. Next day, the estate agent got annoyed when they rang me up and I refused to give them any feedback on the property that they hadn't bothered to show me round.

- passed a crack off as a "minor cosmetic crack". It went across the entire cross section of the house, over two floors and was large enough in places to take a stacked hand and fist!

- terraced and semi-detached houses being described as detached

- countless shared ownership or retirement properties showing up on searches despite filtering them both out of my searches. (Zoopla's fault for letting agents consistently get away with this)

- Rooms with no pictures (including the living room and master bedroom in some properties). If you don't show me anything, I'm going to assume the worst.

* I was told that I could investigate these once I had had an offer accepted. He was not impressed at my response:

Me: "Thank you for showing me around number 29 today, I would like to make an offer."

Useless estate agent: "Great. What are the terms and how much?"

Me: "I'll let you know once the seller has accepted my offer."

It surprises me too. Seems the obvious route of expansion from where they are now. And, as you point out, it ought to be easy to cut out the middle man given their virtual monopoly.

Clearly they do better by propping up the racket. I presume they can extort quite high fees from agents because the alternative, if they were to go the way you suggest, would erase them overnight.

Allowing you and I to list directly would probably bring in less cash because they'd have to compete on price with a flood of alternatives. 

Yeah, had a few of these, and can add

Turning up without the keys. Asking if I still wanted the place after peering through the tiny window in the front door.

Turning up to the rearranged viewing at the same place without the keys again. 

Calling on the way to a viewing to tell us we only have 10 minutes to view a house, turning up 5 minutes late, and expecting us to be ok with a 5 minute viewing.

The enhanced ignorance is standard. That's to be expected. No point even asking about ground rent, service charges etc.

Sold a house through an agent. He took a dozen mediocre photos, did a not-very-good blurb for his website and for Rightmove, then sat down and waited for his £2300 commission. We had gone to him because of his “local knowledge” but the house didn’t move til we spent another £200 on a professional video.

We still showed folk round the house.

Bought through Purple bricks, couldn’t honestly see the difference. Their fees I think were about £600-700.

I know who’s getting my business next time.

All this minor secretarial work will be about £3900 when you add VAT! Solicitors will be £950!

Funnily enough I've been researching them this morning, they will put you on all the property sites for free! I know they will try and sell us a load of products but there is nothing we need. I'm trying to figure out if there is any downside to going with them. 

You're missing the point. The whole supposed reason for going with an estate agent is their sound advice and quality buyers. If they don't give either of these things then why the hell am I paying an estate agent thousands of pounds? 

If you're prepared to do all the viewings, and they cover your area, it's hard to spot the downside. Seems too good to be true so probably is, but I'm struggling to spot why

Where I was looking, you couldn't begin to evaluate a leasehold property without knowing the lease details.

I saw one with over 900 years remaining on the lease at a peppercorn rent. I saw another, seemingly similar, property on the same estate that turned out to be down to 75 years and had combined service charge and ground rent of nearly £12k per year!

Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong, it's essential info. I mean no point asking the estate agent about those things. You'd do better asking the fridge. 

The only thing I can think of is it might put off a potential buyer somehow, not being a local estate agent. I'm looking into how their channels of communication work between the buyer and us.

We are a very simple sale, no chain or anything so there shouldn't be any inter-agent issues in theory. 

I'd probably just want to make sure I had an understanding solicitor and maybe be prepared for them to quote you accordingly if they've been burned before for whatever reason.

Would make a great off-width though

I suspect there are probably two types of buyer - one who would want to phone an agent for a chat about stuff, and one who would rather book a viewing online and talk to the owner when they get there.  Purplebricks or Strike will appeal to the latter but may put off the former.  I'd further suspect you might find a split there between older and younger, i.e. younger people will prefer the online model, so that's more likely to work for you if you're selling a 2-bed terrace (first time buyer territory) than a large 5-bed country detached (likely to have older buyers).

One thing I'd say is to spend time setting whichever it is up properly.  You can for instance configure when you're available for viewings and avoid a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, but if you see all hours from 0000 to 2359 available to select you are then going to have to have that to-ing and fro-ing which might be slower by e-mail than it would be by phoning an agent.  Like the way people in a hurry like it when you can "instantly book" an Airbnb, it would be handy to be able to do that for viewings too.

How bizarre.  Of course an offer and accepting one means very little, you can always, up to exchange, withdraw or change it.

Hi, 

My wife works for Doorsteps, which is similar to Purple Bricks, but even cheaper. I think £99 gets you listed on Rightmove on a DIY basis. They do some more frilly packages as well.

Initially I was sceptical but it seems to work quite well for people.

TBH, I think it is coming. They will be a defunct as Blockbuster in 10 years. Just needs the population t change its habits.

If you think their service is bad as a buyer, imagine how terrible they can be when you're trying to rent and they can't make as much money off you. You're lucky to get a floorplan at all then!

They still get their bit. £150 from both tenant and landlord to open their standard letting agreement and push 'print' is probably a similar hourly rate.

Sorry, missed a law change there. What I meant to say is:

They still get their bit. £300 from the landlord to open their standard letting agreement and push 'print' is probably a similar hourly rate.

In my experience (I've sold 7 houses now) it's the solicitors that hold things up by batting pointless questions to and fro, often by post instead of email or just picking up the bl**dy phone, questions to which they already have the answers if only they could be arsed to read the information they have been given.

It's the estate agents who have always banged heads together to get past these pointless delays and keep chains of sale together when stupid buyers and sellers make irrational decisions that cock things up for everyone else.

Estate agents only get paid if or when a sale goes through. Solicitors get paid whatever.

We will be selling sometime soon, and we shall use Strike, but I will get a chum to do our photos, after getting 3 prices from local agents and checking on Zoopla, Mouse price and Rightmove myself first.

 

They did this to the lass that bought our house. Fortunately I ran in to her dad in the chippy and when he told me I went round that night, did a quick 15 minute tour and then left her and her boyfriend with the keys whilst I had a brew with her dad.

We agreed a price (12% below market value but it was what she could afford and covered what I needed). The agent was at the end of the street (she lived opposite with her parents) so I walked up and told them and asked for the keys back. 

We need to keep hold of them sir. Why?.  We will book more viewings and will get you more money than that. No the deal is done, hands have been shaken, there will be no other viewings or offers. But we can get a better sale price.. I don't care, I have accepted a price that I'm happy with. But we can get you more. Give me my f###ing keys now.

A few weeks later they rang me, can we collect the keys, we have a viewing booked. I'm sorry, whet part of the house is sold don't you understand? Besides the buyer has the keys, she is redecorating whilst the solicitors do their thing. 

Just had the latest offer from the last viewing after chasing them up. 25k under asking, apparently they never had the budget to get near asking price. I asked the estate agent what financial checks they do, apparently it's just verbal and they don't do any proper checks until after the offer is made!

I never quite got why people were actually upset by "cheeky offers".  Just say no to it.  They will then either come back with a more sensible one or go away, either is fine.

People get much too emotional over house sales.  It's a business transaction, that's all.  (Purchase I get because you're choosing somewhere that will hopefully make you happy for many years, but sale is just realisation of an asset).

I've never had to sell a property but my experience of buying my flat:

Solicitor- awesome, efficient. If anything was chasing me due to a few bits and bobs with with the mortgage taking a few days (I was self-employed at the time)

Estate Agent- Didn't do anything wrong but didn't really do much at all. The previous owners basically paid for some seriously crap photos on a Rightmove listing that didn't do the flat justice (I will be eternally grateful for this mind....), gave the owners a time for  viewing in which they showed me around the place and just handed me the key in a brown envelope on the day. 

Mum and Dad have a string of horror stories.

As has been mentioned on here before, nobody that was good at anything as a kid aimed to be an estate/letting agent.........

Ah I dunno. I've had my time wasted more than once when trying to sell other things. A cheeky offer chancing a bargain is fine but when it turns out the clear asking price is waaaay beyond what they're able to pay after a lengthy exchange well.......fckoff.

One of the jobs of the estate agent (the reason they'd get thousands of pounds) is to financially vet people viewing the property to make sure they're eligible. This is especially important during covid.

I wouldn't care if they made stupid offers if I was dealing with the sale, but if after 6 months the only three offers the estate agent produced are two massively under asking price because they can't afford it and one from someone abroad who disappeared. 

Surely you can understand why that's annoying when they're going to ask for almost 4k when a buyer happens to wander into their midst. 

They are legally obliged to pass on all offers, even daft ones. That's more or less the only rule they do stick to.

They made it clear that the buyers didn't have enough of a deposit to afford more than the offer they made. You'd think they would have asked before teasing us with 3 weeks of the couple 'trying to get a mortgage'. 

Just throwing this out there, the housing market is on the up, houses are selling so if you are not getting offers and those you do are way below asking price what is the cause? 

Is the asking price too high? Is the house not presenting well? 

Out of interest, is 25k massively below asking price? It would have been 1/3rd of the price of our last house but its slightly less than 10% of the UK average house price, I thing offering 10% less is a good starting point for negotiations.

I offered 20% less on our current house, we settled on 18% ish. It's the biggest purchase most people will ever make so haggle your arse off. 

I think it's fairly standard to do something like:

1. Offer really low, this is normally rejected (but you never know!)

2. Offer quite but not stupidly low

3. Buyer counter-offers

4. You end up agreeing about half way between the two

It seems a bit of a pointless process rather than people just setting the asking price to something more reasonable, but you don't have to do it very often.

If the asking price is around 250k (taking the 4k agent fee and assuming 1.5% commission) offering 25k less is hardly outrageous. It's not unreasonable that buyers will want to make their money go as far as possible.

I genuinely don't think any offer is unreasonable.  If it isn't one you are willing to accept, all you do is reject it.

Unless you're with Purplebricks and doing viewings yourself, it's not like it takes any more of your time than saying "no" when the agent rings up with it.  It's nowhere near as much effort as tyre-kickers waste when selling a car.

Some people seem to be offended by a low offer, which is a bit silly and just relates to the cultural obsession we have about house prices -  a sort of "how dare you think my lovely house is only worth that" - which doesn't really make any sense.  It's a financial asset you don't want any more; when you put it on the market you really need to be as detached (!) as possible.

It doesn't hurt the agent to sit on a buyer like that, to see if they manage to 'find' another few k from the bank of mum & dad or stumble upon a magician of a mortgage broker or something, as seems to happen quite often these days. Keeping them warm just in case doesn't sound outrageous, especially if nobody more promising has come along.

Or, from the agent's point of view, any day you might get desperate to sell and accept.
You can follow their logic without feeling obliged to piss on one if they were on fire.

When it first went on the market we had quite a lot of buzz and the market was pretty active so we went with the estate agents first reasonable offer (the person abroad). This wasted several months and when they ghosted it was about 6 weeks before Brexit/Christmas and everything pretty much froze. As the new year begins, getting started with someone that can't actually afford anywhere in the ballpark of the asking price is just the final nail in the coffin of this experience. Obviously I have nothing against lowball offers, though they can be annoying, but during COVID the timewasters should be filtered out. At least that's what I thought we were paying for. 

If our new plan goes ahead, I'll be dealing with all the offers. But at least I won't be chucking 4k down the drain.