To think estate agents aren’t worth the money?

There are good and bad agents for sure. But I don’t want to deal with viewers and the eventual buyers, i don’t want to negotiate and I don’t want to have to chivvy the chain along.
I also do my research and am amazed when I’m shown around by someone who basically just has the keys and knows nothing (this is a big reason why I hate online agents). But there are some good agents who know the market, not just their own properties but what their competitors have and prices achieved. A few questions before engaging them will show you who is on the ball or not.

@myfriendsellshousesI appreciate the costs you’ve mentioned. However, in our case, the agent’s outgoings have been comparatively minimal. They arranged a total of 8 viewings, including one repeat visit, prepared a brochure which we had to correct multiple times and was still not right. Our house didn’t go on their website, didn’t go on Rightmove, wasn’t in their window, and we had no for sale board.

For two of the viewings, we were standing at the door waiting for the agent to arrive so that we could go out as they requested, but she was so late the potential buyers arrived first and I ended up showing them round part of the house until the agent arrived. Each time we went out we asked her to either ring or text when she was leaving so that we could go home, but she didn’t do so once, so we wasted ages waiting in the car down the road. It now turns out that some of the information the agency gave us about the chain beneath us wasn’t accurate, and everything is taking longer than we had been led to believe would be the case. Almost all of the staff in the office left at Christmas with the exception of the inept woman who was late for viewings, who is very hard to contact. The admin woman is beyond incompetent and has made so many errors with the sale so far. It really hurts to be paying £22,000 for what they’ve done under the circumstances and should the sale fall through, they won’t get another chance to sell the house.

Oh and there was no floor plan on ours! Basic shit really!

Having recently sold in North London, using a local independent, I agree a good one is worth the money - sorted the photos and brochure, put it in their window display, did many viewings and post viewing visits, sorted out and let in multiple people for surveys, EPC, etc, due diligence on purchasers finance (no idea how you could even do that yourself) , liaised between my conveyancer and the other side for months, kept the purchaser calm when everything was taking forever.
Get recommendations in your area, there are plenty of reviews online, DM me if you are North London. I paid 1% plus VAT

That's a very fair point. I suppose the argument goes that they are rewarded for getting you as high a price as possible - and incentivised not to just urge you to take an initial low-ball offer, as they don't get any less money for it; but it's true that a very large amount of that higher price they can achieve is down to the rocketing housing market rather than their own efforts.

Then again, the EA staff (and the company itself) will have their own ever-increasing bills to pay, like everybody else, so I guess you could say that they need to maintain income parity and not get left behind.

I don't actually know how many working days equivalent it takes them, as a lot of it will come in dribs and drabs; but surely things like viewings - including travel to and from the property - must add up quite a lot?

I have always gone at least partly by the blurbs. If they’re littered with SPAG mistakes, then to me that indicates a sloppy, unprofessional attitude.

Also, as I was reminded by someone’s post the other day, EAs who don’t include the ( to me essential) room sizes on floor plans are to be avoided.

OTOH there was one who I thought very efficient and professional - until I found out that he was seriously dodgy, and a liar to boot - illicit deals going on.

If AI takes jobs then hopefully estate agents are one of the sectors to be impacted. Solicitors too. Both are experts at time wasting and box ticking for a big fee for the privilege.

I have a male friend who runs a small EA business. Righmove costs over £3K a month for their small business. Zoopla is over £600. Then they have to have expensive PI Insurance. They have to have various professional subscriptions. They have to pay an AML fee to HMRC. Employees have to have regular AML training. Employees have to be paid regardless, both wages and mileage. The agents have their own motor costs to do valuations and viewings etc.

The agent only gets the 1% commission if the house sells, so if it gets taken off the market, or the vendor switches agents, they get nothing for all their hard work. They have to visit and give an initial value, then visit again to take measurements and photos to put on Rightmove.

They do all the viewings, they negotiate the price when people offer below price. Some buyers/vendors can get very stressed during the process so they have to keep everyone calm and reasonable. I have seen my friend work so hard to keep a chain together when one of them gets wobbly, or loses their sale.1% commission is actually a very low amount to pay for somebody to take care of all of that for you.

It also takes you out of the equation, it removes a lot of the emotion from it. My friend prefers people not to be home when viewings are done, because buyers don't look around with the same freedom if somebody is there. The buyer doesn't feel they can comment honestly about the garden being too small, or "that paper will have to go" etc. The buyer needs to be able to envisage themselves living there.

You need to ask around for recommendations, ask friends and family in the area who they used. There are good agents out there as well as bad.

We recently sold my in laws house. Estate agent was rubbish. Left windows open when showing people round, terrible communication.

We instigated most conversations with them, including asking them to reduce the price as we considered it over priced, hence the lack of viewers … they agreed but hadn’t suggested it.

I had to rewrite the spiel on the website as they hadn’t mentioned the beautiful stream at the end of the garden, also no photo of it. Didn’t mention the outstanding schools in the area. All the photos were terrible.

Parting with the best part of £12K was gutting.

Yes, this entirely. You can't have it both ways and declare that EA's 'only take a few photos and upload them to Rightmove' - but then freely acknowledge that you need them to do all of the countless much more boring, more difficult, more specialist, more time-consuming tasks as well.

You might as well say that being an author is a ridiculously simple non-job, because "How difficult is it to load a ream of paper into your printer and press 'Print'?"

This is a very good point. Even if you have no other reason than you want to try to save yourself some money, the fact that you've not used an EA may deter a lot of people, and make them think that you've either got something to hide or might otherwise be an absolute clueless mess in the whole process.

They don't know that you aren't a nightmare seller; and you don't know that they aren't a nightmare buyer.

@PinkElephants356 I agree with you. The house that we’re buying is through an agent which doesn’t have a high street office and their commission is 0.75% compared with the 1.2% that we’re paying. We last moved nearly 35 years ago and things have changed a lot since then. The thing I hate the most is that you’re expected to go out and leave strangers, who know very little about your house, to show other strangers around your home. Fortunately we only had a handful of viewings before the house sold, but we spent the whole time we were out watching the CCTV 🤣. If our sale falls through, we won’t be going out for future viewings.

@CurlyhairedAssassin 1.2%

What percentage commission was she on?

Estate agent commission is part of what's contributed to increased house prices. It's in their interest for the sale price to be as high as possible. It's wrong. Really, what extra are they doing to earn 40 or 50k or more on just one house sale in London?. They arrange for a glossy brochure to be produced. Those sorts of houses are in the kind of locations that the super wealthy people want, not some dodgy part of Tower Hamlets. They virtually sell themselves when you're tapping into the right market. There's a limited pool of super wealthy buyers so it's not like they have to field millions of calls and do loads of viewings with anxious and skint first time buyers all the time. They just have to market in the right places, meet with a few agents who work for the potential owners and who do the initial searches for them, and then do the same sort of chasing up of conveyancers etc that they'd have to do on any other property sale.

A flat fee is what's needed, with broad price brackets based on property value. The super wealthy and their agents expect fancy offices, not somewhere cheap sandwiched betwee a Greggs and a William Hill so I do understand those locations have to be paid for.

Ours were amazing, mainly I think because we were interested in buying another property they were selling and then they found us a buyer they were also representing. I think as the middle property we got an amazing deal, they got us a fantastic price for ours and convinced the sellers to drop the price for us.

This is crazy though, you want them to do all the shitty bits that you don’t want to do and charge less? That doesn’t make any business sense. The parts you describe are surely the time consuming bits for agents.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare the commission EAs get with solicitor fees.

Solicitors always get paid for the work that they have done whereas EAs very often don’t get a penny as most work on the basis of not getting paid unless the house sale gets to completion. So naturally they have to get paid more for the ones that do get to completion, or go out of business.

You’re not wrong. The he idea that they help the sale goes through is a very simplified version of ‘they cause chaos by repeatedly lying to each side to ensure people feel rushed and threatened’!

my recent sale/purchase - I sold it on the condition the buyer new I hadn’t found an onward purchase and it might take some time. They said he was fine with that but actually never told him so he started getting understandably pushy and stressed.

with my purchase my survey came back worried about a specific issue so I asked for money off to fix it. I got it. But it turns out the agent told the sellers I was walking away otherwise even though they had evidence it had been fixed already! I would have accepted that evidence so that cost them £10k for no reason!

I think this too. I sold my house with purple bricks because I can do a much better job of selling my house than an estate agent because I can answer accurate questions about my house then and there, if I get a comfortable vibe from a person I let them view my house on their own after the initial tour round, and most importantly I can give a buyer what an estate agent can never give them and that is an hours viewing on a Saturday when they’ve only just requested the viewing the day before.

It also annoys me that they make the most commission out of everyone; when you compare what they do to what a solicitor does, it really is a lot of money for very little effort.

So to actually sell a house one can do without them, but when it comes to going through the process to get to exchange, I would have found it easier with an actual estate estate agent to be the contact between us and the buyer, who would also try and keep it going smoothly.

I think it would be great if there were local estate agents without expensive high street offices where a seller can still do the viewings, write up, pictures etc., but the estate agent can book in viewings over the phone without the need for an online portal, can manage offers and also manage the process up until exchange, so an in between online agents and high street agents that in turn charge much less than a typical high street estate agent.

I would not want to be giving an Estate Agent 1/2% commission if I was selling a top end property.

When I compare why my solicitor is doing for my sale and what the estate agent is doing, there is little comparison in terms of value for money. My solicitor is brilliant - he is incredibly proactive, rings me regularly with updates and to discuss some of the issues with my sale and purchase, and we’re paying him around £6000 in his fees for both the sale and purchase. By comparison, we are paying the estate agent £22000 for doing very little to sell our house. The photos and brochure were fairly dreadful and full of inaccuracies. They sold our house off market in less than ten days, so didn't have to do too much in the way of marketing. They had four attempts at getting the memorandum of sale right, and that took them over a week. The area manager, branch manager, and one of the negotiators left at Christmas, leaving a very inexperienced negotiator who did very little to progress the sale. After no contact for several weeks, we’ve now got some support from the manager of another local branch and they are now chasing things with our sale. I really begrudge every penny that we will be paying the estate agent, whereas our solicitor is a bargain in comparison.

A good estate agent will already have a bank of clients that he/she knows are looking for a property of that type. That's the kind of agent that's good.