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!

Forgot to add that of course they (mostly) don't work at weekends .... just when many people would like to speak to them, view properties etc.
We have sold and are trying desperately to find a rental house for when we move out in 2 weeks. The only house that looks suitable ( the others all small flats) has no inside pics, no floorplan, no clue as to size (m2). Agent says they cannot do this until the house has been vacated. Thus we cannot know if our stuff will fit in, but the agent expects us to spend hours travelling - not at weekend as of course they do not work then - to view it just on the offchance it will be big enough. I understand the tenant has the right to privacy etc, but would you not think the fecking landlord might have in his possession photos of the interior, floorplan etc, or even square metreage, and supply them to the agent who is marketing his property? What a shower of useless twats. I could scream with frustration at how crap they all are.

Thing is as a long term renter of decent sized houses, we can tell immediately just on sq footage and a floor plan if it remotely works

I can save agents wasted viewings! And I'm sure many mumsnetters are the same

@Crikeyalmighty yes I would be able to tell from sq footage, even without a floor plan! Unfortunately many agents do not consider these essential. Just had a conversation, through gritted teeth (mine) with some gormless individual in the rental office - we have an appointment to view a rental on Thursday, in England. We are in Scotland, so a day off work and a long drive. There is no floorplan, only one photo. They promised these would be available today. They are not, and I said why on earth does the landlord not provide this information to them. I was told I was welcome to view the property and bring a tape measure. I guess rental properties are so scarce that they don't need to bother.