Estate agents

[Spencer08]

Has anyone bought a property in the local area lately? Good/bad experiences of Estate agents? We have been looking for a house and just don't know whether to believe anything they say...mentioning no names!

there are chains and locally run agents, Gibson Lane are quite good I ahve heard, Goldsnapes good for Norbiton side of town

Hah! Buy ours - it's just gone on the market!

Personally would steer clear of Foxtons since they've treated us badly as sellers and tenants. Also finding them OTT as buyers tbh.

We bought our house from Your Move and thought they were very good - calming influence on the person that sold our house to us.

Lords are also good I found last time.

Dexters very professional (and seem to have lots of houses in this area recently), but a leetle bit more Foxtons-y imo.

Think basically there are very few houses on the market which is continuing to push house prices up, though not massively.

We keep getting sent details for houses outside the area we're looking for. (We're absolutely set on a certain area.)

Not sure how many buyers there are out there since the EAs have been really quite keen this time round and we weren't treated the same at all 7 years ago.

Would study Rightmove etc avidly to get a feel for the prices for the type of property you are after and then use that as a guide.

FWIW we've put ours on at a reasonable price because we genuinely need a bigger house. There will always be people who need to move on because of new jobs, divorce, babies whatever and those people should balance the market out.

In our search we've seen quite a few houses that are over-priced or where the owners aren't prepared to take (what I consider) a reasonable offer and are still chasing what the houses were 18 months ago / when they bought. Just adds an extra complication. Not so desperate to move that we'll pay 20% over the odds.

Thanks, it is a really confusing time at the moment with things being valued 20% higher than 8 months ago, which tbh puts us off offering, although who knows what these properties actually go for. Things seem to be cooling off a bit recently, a few properties, albeit overpriced, are hanging around on the market a little longer and things that were under offer reappearing.

We've just bought a place which was through Greenfields. Found them very good, the senior sales negotiator managed to get us the deal of the century so we are very pleased. I think the vendors had a couple of minor issues with them but overall everything went through very smoothly.

We also looked with Lords and Dexters. Found Lords just trying to sell us those horrible new builds (can't stand them) and a girl at Dexters who was very dizzy that took us to the wrong house to view!

The problem with Surbiton is the lack of good family houses. Before we bought we were monitoring what was happening in the market for a good 12-18 months and everything was going like hot cakes. Some houses were going for well above asking price! Surbiton is in its own 'microclimate' with regards to the housing market, when EAs say that houses are going for asking price it's probably true. The only reason we got a good deal was cos the vendors had found the house of their dreams and wanted to move quickly.

Good luck!