to be completely pissed off with estate agents?

[ginghamstarfish]

Just sold my house, and been looking to buy for a while now. I am appalled at the poor standard of most estate agents - and also amazed that the sellers of houses don't check their listings to see what a poor job the agents do and pull them up on it! Some of our gripes -
listings come on with no photos - what's the point of that?

• don't say what kind of heating (we now realise that if it doesn't say it's because it's electric, oil or lpg, and they don't want to say so) but how annoying to have to wade through the whole description to find it's not there when it should be a bullet point at the top


• don't have floorplan


• don't have EPC (thought this was mandatory), even after many weeks on the market - again we have realised that if told it's 'not yet available' it means they have it and it's very poor


• poor photos, often many of same room, none of some rooms, often none showing front of house clearly, nor back of house


• if clicked on maps say 'streetview not available in this location' why don't they get off their arse and take a photo, from the street, and add it?


• they can't be arsed to take 2 minutes to put the map pin on the actual house (yes it can be done as we got our agent to do so) so you spend ages up and down the street trying to find the house you're looking at


• no outline plan to show the boundary or extent of the garden/land (often very hard to distinguish with rural properties) - even when it's a piece of land for sale


• don't say how many m2 which would be very helpful for comparisons

Why is everyone putting up with this pathetic service? They get thousands of pounds for each house sold, god knows how they justify this for what little they do. Please tell me others feel the same!

Part of the problem is that they seem to measure their success by how many viewings they generate. So things like keeping quiet about the electric heating which is ruinously expensive, or the floor area because it's a rabbit hutch, are done to hoodwink viewers into going to have a look. This doesn't help their client, because the problem is obviously going to emerge at the viewing and viewers are not going to take the place. And it pisses off the person viewing. So I'm guessing it's done for some sort of internal performance targets.

My impression is always, if no floor plan they have something to hide.

I know one of the reasons they dont specify sizes and boundaries on rural properties or those with large gardens is because it is difficult to get it right and its something that gets confirmed through solicitiors when they look at land registry details. They cant risk putting things in property details that end up being wrong.

i agree with bad photographs and you are right that vendors should not choose crap agents - but most people dont move house very often and they have no idea how to sell their house - examples being they expect the photographer to ‘stage and tidy’ their house - this wont happen unless you are paying a lot of money for someone to specifically do this. Vendors need to present their house.

ordinary estate agents get paid barely above minimum wage yet are expected to ‘dress’ professionally and drive a smart car. The only staff that earn a bit more are senior negotiators and managing directors. Most weekend staff are part timers who know very little.

We were house hunting for about a year recently and didn't come across those kinds of problems - maybe you just have really rubbish estate agents in your area!

I'm looking at the moment. I can't believe how little effort they are putting into selling properties. Perhaps it is due to the hot market. But I offered an a house last month and was told that it had just sstc. Here we are a month later, still on rm. I rang up yesterday - oh yes, it fell through. So why didn't they ring me, another interested party? I have registered interest with many estate agents but receive nothing from them just see houses as they appear on rm. I offered £5k below asking on a property and it was rejected - fair enough. Except three weeks later it sold for £8k below asking. Why didn't they come back to me?

Or the seller is too cheap to pay for one. Mine cost £50.

You learn how to read estate agents details..

No picture of the outside of the house? It's overshadowed by a crematorium chimney.

No mention of how it's heated? Brazier in the front room.

Three pictures of one room? None of the others have floorboards.

Fisheye lens on the bathroom? It's too small to bend over in to towel your calves.

Something not mentioned? It hasn't got it.

....there's a whole thread in this. Feel free to add some.

It's not just my area, am in Scotland and looking in England. Agree with them not even taking details of interest in properties under offer, have had this too, then see the house back on the market but they couldn't be bothered to make a list of interested parties the first time. I have to spend so much time on this, doing their fecking job for them, ringing each agent to ask for the details that should be there but aren't. I'm not blaming the (mostly nice) people who answer the phones, but presumably each agency has a boss who should get a grip and do the job professionally, as they charge professional-level fees.
Oh, and another one for prospective sellers - READ THE CONTRACT. One time we sold we didn't really check the fine print, knew the fee, where it would be advertised etc but sadly failed to notice that the contract lasted for ALL ETERNITY unless you paid a termination fee. After a whole year on the market with no joy, that is just what we had to do, and they would not budge nor accept their incompetence as we had no advice from them, just to keep lowering the price. Now we read contracts carefully and would never accept the quoted percentage, but negotiate hard for a lower one, and state the contract length.

Where is this thread… I need some light relief from the housing stress !?

Finally coming to the end of two years of house hunting. Yes some estate agents are terrible at marketing. But they haven’t really had to have they?! The things I’ve learnt are - if not all rooms have pictures then there is a massive problem with the property ditto if they only use one outside photo. No floor plan means it is so tiny, the pictures are probably lying. If there is a video, it’s probably a show reel for the wannabe estate agent trying to score an Oscar. Forget their street view it’ll put you on a nicer part of the area- use google earth and street view yourself. Look at older listings for the house - then compare photos, they will often be the same in furniture layout which signals tiny rooms!

I mean, it lends itself to a thread. We should start one.

Oh, we have. This is it.

---

No mention of local transport? There's a burned-out bus at the end of the street and that's your lot.

No list of fitted appliances in the kitchen? They're taking the mangle with them.

If it doesn't say the garden's south-facing, it's due north and the terrain's utterly flat between your back door and Siberia.

Unless the garden is billed as 'mature and secluded', it consists of two hundred square feet of concrete, dotted with dogshit and overlooked by the traffic jam on the bypass.

Anything other than 'quiet residential street' means 'drive-by shootings all day and kerbcrawlers looking for hookers after dark'.

don't have EPC (thought this was mandatory)

Not mandatory for Listed properties.

is the epc actually worth anything? The one on the property I’m hoping to buy has come back as totally the opposite of all the surveys we’ve had done so far. Might as well have been done on a different house. 🤷‍♀️

It’s a remnant left over from the aborted sellers’ packs, isn’t it? The guy who did it on my parents’ house was there for such a short time I can’t see how it could possibly mean anything much.

I had forgotten about the sellers pack fiasco. Guess it has hung on as it’s an easy money spinner and ticks some eco box. (Even if they are bollocks).

If you know the address you can look up the EPC in the EPC register for free. Not quite the point, but handy to know.

I think you may well be right about the viewings thing.

In the early 1980s, I was an estate agent for a couple of years. The rule of thumb in those days was that, on average, you got a sale for every 14 viewings. Managers were obsessed by it.

At one firm, I was frequently bollocked for not getting enough viewings, despite the fact that my sales were among the best and that my personal viewing to sale ratio was 8:1 rather than 14:1. I was simply told that I'd get almost double the number of sales if I upped my viewings more in line with everyone else's.

Pointing out that cajoling people into viewing houses that they wouldn't want wouldn't achieve any more sales didn't cut it.

And I voted YANBU without even reading the opening post because being pissed off with estate agents is perfectly reasonable, whatever the circumstances.

I think it depends where you live. There are some very modern agencies where I live and their listings show professional photographs as well as a video tour or 3d virtual tour. The more old fashioned agent listings look dire in comparison. However, properties sell like hot cakes whatever here, so neither type of agency has to do that much but at least you get your monies worth if you go with the agents who are showcasing the home for you.

We have also been house hunting for what feels like forever. I can count on one hand how many times an agent has called me proactively about a new property. They don’t need to, they will get wider coverage using rightmove and social media

The agent I used when I moved a couple of years ago was very good overall. The only thing I had an issue with was the blurb at the bottom of the listing describing the area regarding schools, transport, social life etc. I rewrote it to include things he missed and correct his English.

I didn't realise vendors had to pay for them. That explains why so many don't have them.

I went to see a house a while ago. It had one of my essential requirements: a downstairs lav (not common in small houses, especially older ones).

What I didn't realise was it didn't have an upstairs lav - the bathroom only contained a bath and basin, and had been photographed in such a way that it led you to believe the bog would be in the corner you couldn't see.

I've also phoned several agents with questions about properties, not wanting to do a 40 mile round trip to see something that's unsuitable. I've never, ever got a call back.

I think they've got too used to it being a seller's market. If we do get a property slump, the lazy fuckers won't know how to sell a house.

We are house hunting at the moment and lack of a floor plan is the thing I hate the most.

Very few photos usually means something to hide. Occasionally you get far too many photos. 40 photos with multiple of the same thing from different angles in a 3 bed semi - I must have a short attention span because i find that really annoying.

Yes. Absolutely sick to the back teeth of estate agents.

All the care about is being able to harp on about the high prices they get for houses and this is whether the sale goes through or not … so people think wow this estate agent is fantastic without realising that half of these big sales haven’t actually gone through yet.

And the same shit in every description. It’s tedious.

I'm surprised that Rightmove haven't made more of EPC yet. As energy prices continue to rise the cost of heating a home will be more important.

EPC where bulbs are non-LED strike me as silly. Perhaps EA should import sellers that they can make improvements in the EPC by replacing all bulbs as low energy before calling in the EPC person.

In second place for the things I will not forgive Tony Blair for, after Iraq, is not regulating estate agents. Allegedly the reason was that it would restrict competition.

We aren't actively looking but we plan to downsize when we retire in a couple of years and are doing a lot of "research" of areas we would like to move to. I also do fantasy searches of equestrian properties in case of a lottery win & what winds me up is the arty shots like a mug on a worktop in front of a vase of flowers or a close up of a cushion that tell you nothing about the property. Especially when it's a £2.5m+ house and there are no photos of the stables/arena/paddocks or even how many acres just "paddocks" and no dimensions on a floor plan = assume not enough room to swing a cat.