To think estate agents aren’t worth the money?

[Thatescalatedquickly2]

We are looking to buy a bigger place. Selling our flat in. London to buy a family home.

I’m told estate agents charge 1-2 percent commission on a sale. Our place is worth about 650k, so that’s going to be hugely expensive for taking a few pics and sticking it on rightmove.

I’ve also been viewing some places and I can’t say I’ve ever met an estate agent who adds value. When we were looking for our flat, they often hardly knew about the property, no idea about the area and didn’t really ‘sell’ a place to us.

aibu for thinking we should just go for cheapest option?

They have to go through Purple Bricks or similar. I have yet to successfully view anything advertised on Purple Bricks. Their admin teams just never get back to you.

We also sold for asking price in the worst possible market with a great local agent.

She was like Mrs Doyle from Father Ted but infinitely more sweary.

This. Find a decent estate agent with an excellent chain chaser and it'll all be worthwhile.

When I bought my current house the vendor was a complete nightmare and dragged her feet over finding a property to move to. The Estate Agent was brilliant. He spent weekends driving her to view properties(!) and eventually found one she liked (she wanted to move to a town 50 miles away so this was quite an undertaking), helped sort out her chaotic paperwork and was generally a complete superstar, holding the chain together when it almost collapsed twice due to the vendor being an absolute twat. On the day we finally completed he was at the house to meet me with the keys as the vendor was there but completely drunk - at 11am. Don’t ask!

We recently sold my late parents house and the EA (a different one) somehow managed to make a house with 45 years worth of clutter and a bathroom and kitchen from the 1980s look presentable. I have no idea how he tidied everything away so effectively and took brilliant pictures and a video. I didn’t recognise the house in the listing?! On the first weekend he dealt with over 30 viewings and scheduled regular Zoom calls with me and my siblings to carefully go through offers and explain pros and cons of various buyers. He made himself available to us for any questions etc. We completed the sale in about 8 weeks.

I know there are rogue, awful EAs but if you find a good one then they are worth every penny.

I think that if you tried to do it yourself, you'd soon realise that estate agents do more than you realise.

As I said earlier, mine saved me from spending £10k for no benefit, got offers from half of the viewers, and sold for £15k more than I'd dared hope for (which in this cheap area was roughly 8% more. Then of course all the hidden work that they have to do to get it to completion point, and nagging conveyancers.

You can. I am right now.
I listed my house on Visum, which directly posts it onto Rightmove.

I am doing my own viewings and plan to do my own Memorandum of sale.

There’s not much else that the estate agent does.

We moved last year and our EA kept me sane. It was a long process from March to November with a house purchase and sale falling through in the middle of it. We were moving 150 miles away so it wasn’t easy but our EA liaised with our solicitor ( who was vile) other EA up and down the chain, kept pushing, having difficult conversations, giving us good advice, keeping us positive and was like a friend by the end. Can’t speak highly enough of her. She earned her commission.

Well I wouldn’t buy a house where the sale wasn’t being managed by an estate agent, so they’ll bring value in expanding your buyer pool, probably quite dramatically just by Rightmove listings alone.

We spoke to our vendor’s EA at least weekly through our house buying process and they facilitated all comms through the solicitors. They knew nothing about the house when we viewed it, but that wasn’t where they added value.

Our estate agents normally charge 5% plus vat on properties starting at around 300k€ for a 2 bed apartment up to at least 1.5m€ for a 3-4 bed detached 😮

Plus they expect payment on exchange not on completion

We’re not in the uk

I used a local independent after being very unimpressed with EA's from chains that came to value our house and properties we looked at. Ours was worth his weight in gold, chased solicitors, buyers, vendor and worked his backside off to get a very stressful exchange over the line at the last hour.

Interesting response! it sounds like- with a few exceptions - people think they make a difference.

I have to say I did have a good experience with an estate agent outside London. But I’ve yet to find that in London.

I don’t mind paying if there’s a benefit- if they can get me a higher price. I’ll jus be avoiding some of the more notorious London firms!

When I said “keeping things moving” I’m talking more about the conveyancing process and keeping the chain intact, not sales leads.

On both my last two transactions my lawyer did that, not the estate agent.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

What percentage commission was she on?

@CurlyhairedAssassin 1.2%

@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.