Are Purple Bricks/Yopa etc any good

[MehMehM3h]

Hi All, we are looking to put our house on the market and were wondering if anyone had used purple bricks or Yopa to sell their house?

Were they any good? Any pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks in advance!

Nope. YouTube purplebricks from watchdog and search the many threads on here about them. Don’t bother with the trustpilot reviews as they are false and edited. Any negative ones are removed.

Also, why pay for a service that has yet to be delivered. Pay an agent when they have sold your house.

Purplebricks take your fee, then leave you to it. As a buyer I have had a bad experience with them. They were rude, obstructive and unhelpful when I was trying to arrange a viewing on a property I was interested in. I didn't view it in the end, I don't deal with people like that.

If that is how they treat buyers then I wouldn't like to be a vendor dealing with them. Its a cheap fee for a cheap service.

Know nothing about Yopa.

Thanks both! I'll do some more research. Drum71 thanks for the comment about trustpilot - I did read it and was impressed! Really glad I posted here now.

As a buyer I found purple bricks brilliant - I really liked being able to communicate directly with the vendor.

As a seller, I would use them if:

a) the property is in a popular area with a buoyant market
b) the property is likely to sell quicky
c) you are happy to deal with negotiations yourself.

We should have gone with them.Other than photos and rightmove our estate agent did nothing and we paid them almost 2k. Not because they were bad, just because the house was popular.

Trust pilot reviews are incredibly unreliable because they offer cash compensation to those leaving bad reviews if they remove/edit the review

As a buyer, I found purplebricks awful. To get the lowest price, the seller was tied in to using their conveyancers who are truly awful. Not replying to anything, not updating seller, not sending paperwork when they should. I ended up 1 hour from my absolute deadline for pulling out - think it was only luck they didn't miss it. Even on the day of the move, it took them 2 hours to let their client know they could hand over the keys

I'd never sell with them and I'd never buy a house via then again.

*when I mean 'they' I mean the company being reviewed usually offers financial compensation to reviewers to edit/removed bad review.

When you write a review on trustpilot you are prompted to enter the order number etc so the company usually track the reviewer to negotiate to remove the bad review

We used purple bricks to sell our 3 bed semi in a great school catchment, desirable area etc. The house had been fully renovated and extended by us. It was in an area of similar age semis and detacheds. If I do say so myself it was very well staged for sale.

We'd actually decided on a local agent but were unimpressed with the sales blurb they put together, which was copied and pasted from the last time the house had been sold (which was not by them) and was therefore wildly out of date given the full renovation. Photos were shit too. We felt that if we were going to have to do so much of it (rewriting/retaking pics) we might as well be going with someone who would charge us less. We didn't use their conveyancers. I liked the agent. We sold for full asking price in 36 hours.

However, our onward purchase was riddled with problems and the agent from purple bricks did nothing to hold the sale together, didn't communicate up the chain etc. The other agent did work hard and our solicitor worked his absolute socks off to keep things together.

I would not use purple bricks to sell our current house but I would consider them for selling something similar to the house I mentioned above, particularly if I was going into rented. It would depend on the market and the house but I wouldn't completely rule it out.

Currently trying to look at a place being sold by Purple Bricks, yesterday my husband went by train to the place we're looking at - but no estate agent. Apparently the agent was on holiday and his emails shouldn't have been picking up bookings - oh well that's ok then.
My mother's property was sold by them, once the agent that we'd spoken to quit the day after seeing us and left us in limbo for a week or so, but after that it all went OK. We'd have definitely got more with another agent, but their fees are a lot higher, so that was a bit swings and roundabouts; but I was out-voted anyway.
But I know I'd never use them to sell a property. They're cheap but there's a reason for that...

In a good market the online EA is a great money saver. In a dead market like it is here now I'm seriously regretting the £1200 we paid Purplebricks to sell our house. We priced to sell to start with at significantly lower than the competition & had 3 incredibly low offers, but our EA couldn't be bothered to negotiate them to a level that we could accept. Our EA promised the earth, we would get a buyer, we wouldn't lose the house we were hoping to buy.. then she proceeded to sit back & do nothing so we lost the house. Having said that, the market is seriously stagnant here & very little is actually selling, regardless of who it is on with. Not sure what to do next. DH is understandably reluctant to spend anymore money.

Hi MNers Purplebricks have been in touch and would like us to post the following on their behalf:

"We are really proud of our Trustpilot reviews and welcome all feedback from genuine customers, whether it’s good or bad. Customers can edit their reviews at any time so if their service changes, they can update what they have said. Review sites are relied upon by consumers as a genuine and fair reflection of the service being provided by a company so when any review is posted, regardless of the rating, we try and verify it is a real customer using the information they have provided. If we can’t, we use Trustpilot’s “find reviewer” tool to contact the reviewer directly and ask for more details. They have two weeks to respond and if they don’t, the review is reported to Trustpilot to look into. Purplebricks reports far more 4 and 5 star reviews than 1 star reviews and Trustpilot has published an open letter explaining it has no concerns about our process whatsoever. You can read their letter HERE. We also monitor our Net Promotor Score (NPS), which effectively means we ask customers to rate their experience every time they interact with our platform. We receive thousands of ratings and review the score and comments every week. We are extremely pleased that our excellent Trustpilot score is reflected in our Net Promoter Score of +78, which is on par with companies such as Amazon and Disney."

Clutching at straws. Utter bollocks 😀

Tried viewing a few properties in the Ashford area of Kent recently and the Purple Bricks agents were rude, uncommunicative and desperately unhelpful. Wouldn't EVER use them to buy or sell a house. Avoid like the plague!

Are there any online estate agents that anyone would recommend?

We sold through Purple Bricks and paid up front so that we didn't have to use their solicitors.

They were ok before we got a buyer but absolutely disappeared afterwards leaving it to us to contact the buyer and their solicitor even down to picking up keys.

Fortunately both us and our buyers had got good solicitors which meant it wasn't too difficult but our vendors had a really shitty cheap one and it was there we saw how valuable a proper estate agent was.

If we'd gone for Purple Bricks solicitors I'm pretty sure the sale would have fallen through because there's no way we could have managed that level of chasing up on two ends.

On balance the buying/selling process was easy through Purple Bricks but the post-offer stage was so self driven that we wouldn't use them again - I'd happily lose a couple of k in commission from the sale price to hand it over to someone else!

Oh and also they push you to leave a trust pilot review as soon as you get an offer rather than after completion which I think will skew the results significantly.

All the houses we looked at last year that were on with purplebricks still haven't sold! Five or so!

All are still overpriced and reluctantly and gradually knocking 5k off here and there but it's not enough

I can only conclude they give you too high an estimate and a low fee so that you go with them because then you owe them and they don't have to do anything.

We went with a regular agent and sold within 6 weeks after one price drop (this was last year right before the market fell off a cliff)

I've been in property industry (conveyancing searches) for many years now and have heard some concerning news about Purple Bricks. Although the fees for selling are cheaper than perhaps your high street agency the fees involved with the conveyancing process aren't. I cant recommend estate agency in your area, however would be happy to help to navigate you to good surveyors, solicitors and offer advice where I can. I believe the purchasers and sellers are sometimes left in dark and this makes the whole process much more stressful.

We recently sold with YOPA. Had purple bricks, YOPA and a high street agent round. Yopa offered everything the high street offered plus the online login system so we could see everything in real time. Purple bricks only offered pay upfront and also if we didn't use their conveyencing we would have had to pay an extra £350 on top.
Even without the extra they were still more expensive than yopa as they are counting my postcode as London whereas yopa were not. Overall I was really happy with everything and the agent literally lived down the road from me. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them.
If anyone wants a referal code to get 100 pounds off its nickysullivan

Our vendor used Yopa and our experience as a buyer with them was fine - there was an agent etc and it was super easy to offer and negotiate via them or directly with vendor.

Purple bricks have an incentive to sell quick. It's great if that's what you want and is really simple, easy to navigate and less faffing. I'd trust them more than a usual estate agent.

Saying that, having that incentive to sell quick means a lot of pressure on you lowering the price... they'd rather it was way below market value to be careful.

I didn't have any pressure from Yopa to reduce or sell for a lower price. I listed and sold quickly for more than the asking price. Very happy with them indeed. A local agent called Kyri is very experienced and knows what hes doing to get you the best price.

HouseSimple are an online agent, fixed fee, under 1K . Unlike Purple breeze blocks, who you owe money to whether or not your house sells, with HouseSimple it's no sale no fee, just like high street agent, but so much cheaper. You can edit the description yourself, and decide which photos to use. Can upload your own photos, change them around.
Booking viewings is simple.

The house hasn't sold, but tbf, similar houses in this price range in this area aren't selling either.

I've had good experience selling with Yopa.

I wasn’t impressed with Yopa. The photos weren’t great, the floor plan inaccurate and the written details very sketchy. And we did get some pressure to accept a very low early offer with some scare-mongering used to try and persuade us.

When things got sticky just before exchange, the two proper estate agents in the chain did all the work to keep the chain intact.

It’s difficult, because we paid £850, whereas with a proper estate agent, we’d have been paying £4000. In truth, everyone in the chain benefitted from the work done by the two proper estate agents, even though only their clients paid for them.