Estate agent want to charge £30k

[ThinkAboutItTomorrow]

I get that estate agents are on commission to incentivise them to get the best price but surely there's a better way?

We live in London and are very lucky to have a lovely home. estate agents want 1.5% + VAT commission which would be £30,000 if we get the asking price.

But they don't do any more work for the £30k from me Vs the £7.5k they'd get selling a small flat. Do they? With Rightmove etc the benefit of the flashy high street office must be negligible.

IABU - there's more to it and the service and experience justifies the cost
YANBU - just use an online seller and pay £1,500 there's no way a local office can add £28.5k of value.

Surely this is the sort of "middle man" operation the internet should be getting rid of?

That said, I have heard bad things about Purple Bricks.

We had such a terrible experience with Purple Bricks, we could prove via emails that their agent lied to us and that actually agreed to cancel all their upfront fee when we cancelled the contract.
Wouldn't touch them with a barge pole ever again.

I think everyone resents EA fees, I certainly did and they were much less than that. However, with anything, you get what you pay for. Our house sold really quickly and our EA was always on hand and we had a named contact who was really easy to get hold of when we needed to. Money well spent I’d say.

THink yourselves lucky - in Portugal the main agencies charge 5% plus VAT commission - we are the lowest I know of at 2.5% sole agency. Although agents here are lucky to get a basic salary - most have to work another job in a restaurant or bar, as they have to pay their own cars, phones, advertising etc. Then they have to give 50% of the commission to the agency, and whoever else they share with (for example another agent brought the buyers in). Anyway - it is a lot cheaper in the UK than Portugal and it doesn't matter the value of the property - the commissions are the same.

Flip it around, and stop thinking about how much it would cost you in fees.

Say they get you £10,000 over the asking price, their commission is only £150.

Doesn’t sound that astronomical at all- you gain £9,850.

Ok just my perspective but we are about to pay our estate agent a similar amount. IMO they have been worth their weight in gold. House never went on any of the online portals and was under offer in 24 hours, we accepted an above asking price offer 6 days after we signed the Ts and Cs. Good agents have a little black book of buyers who are looking for property in particular areas (in our case, our road and the one next to it). We were prepared to go on Zoopla etc but never needed to, so no nosey neighbours criticising our taste etc .
A good agent will manage the chain as well. This is where a lot of purchases at this end fall apart as you are unlikely to get a FTB for a £2-3m house.

Sorry I haven’t read the whole thread but have you negotiated. Try to get it down to one percent by shopping around?

A good EA will;

Market the property approximately to get you the best deal, advise on the price to get the most exposure on search filters etc
Handle viewings, screen out time wasters etc
Properly screen buyers for ‘proceedability’ and manage the offer process
Progress the sale: issue a memorandum of sale giving deadlines for appointing a solicitor, commissioning a survey
Progress the sale: chase everyone’s solicitors, give accurate updates in outstanding matters etc
Sort problems: advise when to seek an alternative survey, negotiate problems, soothe nerves (our chain would have fallen through without the EAs experience in handling fractious buyers)

After buying and selling a few times in the middle of a chain I would do all I could to avoid any property sold though Purple Bricks or handled by an online conveyancer.

I’d be worried about paying Purple Bricks upfront, they have so many legals cases ongoing I’d be worried how long they’ll last.

The poster who said they’d be worried about a vendor using a cheap agent is correct, image does play a part in higher end properties.

Depends how easy your house is to sell. We’ve used agents and purple bricks and have been pleased with both. Agents had a difficult house to sell and purple bricks didn’t. If you don’t think yours will take a lot of effort to sell, either pay purple bricks or try and negotiate your agents fees down.

A high end estate agent will
Work for you - they might sell you house for £50k more than it would sell with an online agent in which case you'll have paid them £30k but still be £20k up.

@Aesop12

Flip it around, and stop thinking about how much it would cost you in fees.

Say they get you £10,000 over the asking price, their commission is only £150.

Doesn’t sound that astronomical at all- you gain £9,850.

Totally. But a) I'm not sure why the agent gets us that? What is their magic? Surely 90% of that is due to the market situation / location / supply and demand? B) if they've cost us £28k more than purplebricks that £10k is a pretty poor return.

If I only get offers under the asking price is that because the agents were useless? They'd cost me £10k but only lost out on £150!

I guess that's the heart of my question - will my local estate agent be likely to get a sales price £28k more than online. I'll price it in line with the 3 estate agents so start price isn't relevant. I'm pretty good at negotiating and my experience is the agent doesn't really give any opinion on if you should take an offer, they just present it.

And actually the maths shows why it's not a good idea to pay as a %. They are guaranteed £24k (as they don't see the VAT of course) so it's barely worth it to them to drive the price up to the full amount.

I had similar thoughts about using a traditional estate agent rather than one of the online outfits like Purple Bricks or Strike when I sold last year.

However I was convinced to go with the traditional agents (with a fee of 1% +VAT) following initial dealings with both, and my preference to have a professional buffer between myself and buyers.

This proved to be the right decision as not only did they did they secure a buyer in less than a week, they kept on top of evasive solicitors (they had dealt with both solicitors offices many times and had good contacts at both) and pushed the whole process through in 13 weeks.

They really justified their fee though right at the end, when my buyers pushed for a price deduction. I was wavering on whether to agree so as not to jeopardise my onwards purchase. But my Agents stepped in, convinced me to hold fire and reminded my buyers of the strength of the market for sellers and that they would easily find another buyer for me and likely with a new price that reflected rising prices over the 3 months since we agreed the sale.

My buyer immediately withdrew the request. The reduction they were pushing for was slightly more than the agents fee. So, in my experience, they more than earned that fee.

I would never try and sell a house using an online only agent. Its not just, or even mostly, about getting viewings, it's about successfully managing through to completion

I've done it three times. No problems and the EA pushed the other party's once. Next time I'd use Strike (free!)

I was immediately put off by online agents when we were looking. Too much messing around, viewings randomly cancelled, awkward viewing conducted by the owners, never seeming to be able to get in touch with a real person, etc. I found the whole process infuriating and we may have missed out on our dream house potentially but we ended up finding pretty close to our dream house through an in-person estate agent and have no regrets. Obviously we were buyers (we sold ours through an estate agent too, but the new house was of more importance to us, and value) but I just thought it might be helpful to hear it from a buyer's perspective not just a seller's. If you want top money for your house you don't want to appear to be cutting corners in basics like estate agents. It makes a potential buyer ponder upon what else you may have cut corners to be honest.

Uk estate agents fees much much lower than France. You don't have much to complain about

The estate agent doesn't get paid if they don't sell. The online agent gets paid regardless so doesnt care if your property even sells, they have their money at the end of the day and you risk people having seen your property sitting on the Internet, making them wonder what the problem is with it.

@thisplaceisapigsty

They should also be offering to advertise in the Sunday papers property pages, mailing out a brochure to possible interested buyers, using a professional photographer, shots using a drone perhaps. All that is where your money goes.

Its 2022

Houses sell online- not through Sunday property pages (no-one reads papers) or mailing out brochures.

Certainly it just a shop front imo, negotiating/liaising/squeezing max value out of people who have made offers.

They had ours sold in 3 days 98% of asking which I already thought was far fetched. It really will be worth the 1%.

Not = it

I bought through Purplebricks, they were so useless that I offered less than I had planned to offer on the basis that if they were that difficult to deal with then I probably wouldn’t get into a competitive offers situation. I don’t know how much the seller saved using them rather than a traditional agent but I hope it was more than the £30k less I offered. That was 10% of the market price so I think the sellers badly lost out.

YABU.

If you don’t want to pay commission then do all the selling yourself.

As a buyer I avoided any houses being sold through Purple Bricks, it was such a faff to sort a viewing and find out more info etc that one experience was enough to put us off completely. I thought the estate agents were really helpful in getting us all to the point of exchange and completion too. I haven't sold through an online only company myself though so I've little idea as to the value they do or don't add to the seller.

Ugh, it's so tricky.

It's not like loads of people go with purple bricks & their property languishes on the market for months, or gets joke offers then when they appoint a high street agent suddenly great offers come in.

I'd love to hear any stories like that if there are some!

Otherwise it's so hard to know if the agent is the difference, though I hear a few people saying it was for them in getting the sale through, which gives me pause.

Thanks everyone for the views.

@tara66

6% in France (on property over 1,000,000Eur.)

Which the purchaser pays not the vendor.