Has anyone sold with Purple Bricks? Are they as good as a regular estate agent?

[KitKat1985]

Hi. Just that really. Am due to put our house on the market in the next couple of weeks, and was wondering about using Purple Bricks as they would potentially be a lot cheaper, but am a bit anxious that they might not be as good as a regular estate agent. Has anyone used them and could tell me their experiences? TIA.

We have been house hunting and have had experience with all kinds. The purple bricks man (I believe you pay extra for them to do the viewings in person) was excellent. He was dressed perfectly, neat, stylish, clean. He was very knowledgeable about the property, answered every single question, provided us with lots of extra info. He was very well mannered, funny, spoke properly. In contrast a lot of the other agents we have encountered knew zero about the properties, we were even correcting some of them, many were grouchy, surly, unhelpful and poorly dressed. We even had a couple of women turn up looking like hookers. I would strongly reccomend asking whoever you choose to give you a tour of your house before making a final decision.

House simple are the better company. As they do what PB do only you pay when they sell your home at significantly less then PB. No brainer.

We used PB but ONLY because we knew we owned a house that would shift quickly as it was in good nick and in a popular area. If circumstances were different, i probably would have used a high street agent if i knew it needed more marketing.

We luckily had an amazing local expert who had been an estate agent for 25 years at a high street branch and we found him very responsive and available to answer queries.

You do have to do all the leg work yourself and we dealt with post sales and progression ourselves as we wanted control. It was time consuming and hard to take calls at work but we managed to get from offer on our house to completion on our new house in 8 weeks.

we were happy to pay the upfront fee and be free to use our own solicitors. also, we were happy to lose the £890 if PB were crap and we had to go with a high st agent - for us, it was worth the punt.

also, you can have marketing breaks, so you could market in September, if had no suitable offers, break in January and resume again in march when market picks up again but you'd need to speak to PB to get the exact details on how this works

redmarkone, we're looking to sell and £890 is a lot of money to potentially lose (certainly is to us) especially if you still have to do a lot of the leg work yourself.

Based on the recent negative press Purplebricks have been getting - particularly when it comes to online reviews - www.thetimes.co.uk/article/reviews-site-accuses-purplebricks-of-corporate-bullying-mzgfsxcdd - it sounds like you lucked out getting a local expert with that much experience and not too bad a turnaround time...

If we were to go with PB it seems like a how well it goes is going to come down to luck!

It’s best to lock up your valuables. Gather them up, put them in the trunk of your car and lock the car. Greet the buyers at the door and say “feel free to look around and let me know if you have any questions.” Then walk out the door. After about 15-20 minutes ask if they have any questions. If you don’t know something just say you are not sure but you will get back to them. Make sure you remove all clutter, large pieces of furniture, anything personal like photos and you will be fine. It’s price and the MLS that sells the home.

I found them fine but would recommend instructing your own solicitor

if you go with them make sure you put your asking price at a realistic level. find what similar properties have actually sold for - all the houses I looked at in may last year on with pb have not sold yet due to being overpriced to start with, and reluctantly dropping a few k here and there but not enough to be in line with the falling market

Just to warn you all if you want your home to sell any time soon, DO NOT instruct Purple Bricks to put your home on the market. They are absolutely clueless. I cannot see what clients are paying for. They put a few photos on the Internet then sit back and do absolutely nothing. This is because whether or not you sell your property, you still have to pay their fee. They have no knowledge about the area my home is in and so cannot give potential buyers any information when asked. I have been told on several different occasions that the company has appeared on Watchdog. Unfortunately, this was after I had instructed them to sell my home. Once you press that button and your property goes Live, the 14 day cooling off period no longer applies. Yet the agent failed to tell me this during consultation. PB is totally useless, unprofessional and are not the right people to sell anyone's home. Do not fall into their trap! I would never, ever recommend them to anyone. Absolute sham!

What Jesussaves1 said. Completely useless! Wasted £1200 & 5 months on what was literally placing an AD online.

I have seen two review websites where PurpleBricks are reviewed.
On uk.trustpilot.com, there are 47,001 reviews for PB, and it scores an average of 5-stars. 89% of all reviews give it 5-stars - "Excellent". A further 7% give it 4-stars - "Great", which means that 96% of customers are happy with the service.

Another site, allagents.co.uk, have 123 reviews, which admittedly is much fewer, but still enough, I would have thought, to produce a reliable average. 114 of the 123 reviews gives PB only 1 star, and the comments are very negative.

How can such a difference exist between two sites that invite reviews from the public?

pilindek, the reason is that PB only invites successful sellers/buyers to review on Trustpilot, so they're more likely to give good reviews. They don't ask unsuccessful clients. We didn't get invited to review them despite wasting £1200 & 5 months on them!

MovingThisYearHopefully - Ah - I understand. However, people frequently seek out review sites when they have an axe to grind, so I'm still surprised that the average is so positive. It seems you're quite dissatisfied, so I hope you'll update Trustpilot and swing the average, if ever so slightly.
OTOH, if they have 47030 good reviews (as of this morning),then they have successfully sold that many houses, so they can't be completely rubbish. I'm sorry you didn't get a sale, though.

I would echo the post about underpricing. We had an experienced motivated agent and were going to use PB until we saw the paperwork, very shabby with mistakes about addresses and prices paid, also one of the properties we were looking at with PB wasn't exactly marketed in the right location. So in the end we went with an old school estate agent and made thousands more than PB predicted.
I did apologise to the PB agent and suggested she might want check her back up I got a reply saying 'all feedback welcome.' Wouldn't use them now.

I'm not able to make a review on PB pilindek. This is why you don't see negative reviews on them. They only invite those who they think will make a positive review to do so. I can't simply go on to Trustpilot & review them. I tried, & I'm guessing many disgruntled customers did, but its not an option to review them unless invited to do so. Its a bit like how small schools will manipulate Ofsted into giving them a good rating, they deliberately "forget" to give parental questionnaires to parents who may have an axe to grind.

Anyone heard of 'If it sounds too good to be true - it probably is'. I can't understand why anyone would want to risk putting their biggest possession in the hands of these guys. Buy cheap buy twice.

We tried to sell via PB but switched to traditional. I don’t feel strongly either way, but from my experience it works well if:

• market is buoyant or your house is in demand
• house is priced reasonably and you take initiative to drop pricing if it’s not shifting
• you are fairly normal and can do a good impression of an impartial estate agent when showing people round
• your PB agent isn’t a waste of space

We liked our agent - he was friendly, responsive and familiar with the local area. BUT when our house didn’t sell he didn’t do much to shift things along, the viewings got really tedious. we got an offer £25k under original valuation (425) after a few weeks and accepted. And then nothing.

Anyway to cut a long story short we found dream house, buyer dropped out, switched to dream house estate agents for a reduced fee. House was sstc in 1 month and purchase of dream house is back on. (All could go tits up). Really noticed a difference vs PB - especially with the after offer care where our EA is greasing the wheels a lot and doing lots of negotiation. It probably doesn’t matter if you are in a short chain and the EAs on either side are good as they will make sure PB keeps things moving. It’s not that PB don’t care - it’s more that they just don’t have the time and they’ve already got their payment.

Last tip. Don’t go with PBs conveyencers. I’ve heard so many horror story. Poor EA + poor conveyancer = nightmare.

ANd just to add I just looked at trust pilot and alarm bells were ringing with a lot of the five star reviews. They just seem fake. My PB agent sent me this link to review them if anyone else wants to post: uk.trustpilot.com/review/purplebricks.co.uk

JustLurk1ng - (Hey, that would be a good name for a boat ;-)
I hadn't realised it, but apparently, not anybody can get onto TrustPilot (I haven't tried, but I spoke to somebody who had). It seems you can only leave a review there if you have been invited, and happy PB clients get invited.

The problem with PB is that the seller has all the advantage. Which is great, but they are so blinded by how it benefits them that they neglect to see how much it puts buyers off. I'm in the process of buying through PB and can only say: never again. I will never even VIEW a house being sold through PB again. So if you use them, be prepared for missing a big chunk of your potential market because lots of other people feel the same way.

Please read the reviews on all agents reviews. Purple bricks are terrible. You sign an agreement to pay their 'no commission ' fees then once they have you signed up to pay they have no incentive to help you as either way -sell or don't sell, they get paid. They are rude and unprofessional, and our agent even lied about our final bill adding vat he didn't tell us about. Read the reviews and please don't add to your life the stress of trying to manage purple bricks. Read the review about the elderly lady they abused. It's heartbreaking. Hope I've saved one person from the purple brick nightmare.

Sorry I should have explained - needless to say they did absolutely nothing to sell our house. Paid over a thousand pounds for a few bad photos on the Internet and a board. Even trying to pay bill another nightmare. Again online but the site kept timing me out. I had to deal with a rude, bored teenager who would not help me and became aggressive on the phone. I just wanted to pay my bill and even that was made difficult for me to do. I was left in tears and shaking. In the end it was worth paying the thousand pounds to rid myself of purple bricks. They won't last long which is some consolation to those they have ripped off.

Bought with purple pricks and it was a complete ordeal.
Randomly moving booked viewings, impossible to get hold of at times, really rude to my solicitors when they were in the wrong. Pain in the arse.