Which is estate agent to choose?

[Banjobollo]

We are about to put our house on the market and hoping someone has experience of this particular quandary. Is it a good idea to go with a really popular and impressive local agent who is marketing the majority of houses in the area? I’m slightly concerned they may try to delay releasing our house in order to sell others first. The alternative agent is the same price and came across ok but only has one local property on their books.
For background we need to move by October for secondary school applications deadline so need to get going ASAP. We’re in a popular area and houses are selling fast with fully booked open days and and houses often going to sealed bids with offers over asking price.

Any thoughts or experiences welcome. Maybe I am overthinking this?!

If they both use rightmove/zoopla and stuff is selling quickly in your area then it’s not going to matter that much.
It’s a bit of a toss up between one who will have more experience but might be too busy or the one who has less experience (I would be wondering why no one uses them or are they just popular in another area)

I would go for the more popular one, then they can steer buyers who may have missed out on a similar local property to your house.

Thank you. I think the popular one just comes across very well and knows the market inside out. Have heard good things from friends that have used them too. They are doing two lots of open days on Saturday (one is two doors up) so was hoping we could tag onto that but he seems to be suggesting we should wait till after Easter which seems odd. It’s not like anyone will be going on holiday!

Yes I thought the popular one would have lots of buyers waiting. I think our house is actually a bit nicer than the other two so maybe that’s why he wants to get them sold first!

We went for one that cost £99 and had offers in a couple of days.

Ours was a difficult house to sell (quite quirky from the outside) We did have it up for sale with an EA but the agent was really trying to press his own agenda on what could be done to the house so we only had people who wanted to do mad things that just wouldn’t get planning permission.
The EA said nobody wanted our house just to leave it as it is
We took it off the market with them and put it up ourselves through the £99 agent and all the viewers were quite happy with the layout. We sold subject to contract within 5 days.

If you know the value and aren’t averse to showing viewers around your self then I wouldn’t waste your money.

I am dealing directly with the buyer.

I would never use a high street EA again

Thanks @Bythemillpond that’s a really interesting perspective

Whatever you do , don’t use Purplebricks

Just to add the commission if the EA had sold it would have been the best part of £10,000

I would never use a high street EA again

Ditto. We’ve sold three houses in the last few years and had our best experience with Purplebricks.

We’ve tried three different local agents who all wanted at least 1% of our sale price (for one house this was around £2,500!) and they were hardly ever available to do viewings for us. Their communication was also incredibly poor, so when our first sale fell through we dropped them. I honestly don’t know what they do to earn their money aside from take pics and put your house on Rightmove/Zoopla.

Purplebricks were great, but I think it depends on who your ‘local expert’ is. Ours was brilliant, and we managed the sale ourselves directly via PB’s platform with our very enthusiastic buyers. It worked well for us, but might not have done in other circumstances.

Thanks all. Will have a look into the online options. The two high st agents have fixed fees of £2,500 plus VAT but the no sale, no fee thing is quite attractive in our circumstances.

Hate purple bricks and it would really put me off a house listed with them.
Go with local agent. Make sure they will conduct all viewings. You are paying for a professional service, and mine, who I've used about eight times in the last 8 years, are great.

My EA (earning 1.25%) has done a brilliant job getting our chain of 5 sales over the line to exchange, coordinating with all the vendors, EAs and solicitors as it has been a v challenging process. They've earned every penny.

I'd go with the ones with the biggest ready market of buyers. Good ones with a reputation in the area will have a lot of pent up demand and people who have just missed out on a previous sale. They will put the effort in and do the right marketing and advise when to steer clear of time wasters. They all want their fees after all.

My EA was completely rubbish. He was charging 1% + VAT which would have come to the best part of £10,000 and he couldn’t shut his mouth telling people how awful the layout was and what he thought could be done.

The people I got love the layout and they don’t want to do anything to it. None of the viewers I got in wanted to do anything to the house.

Can’t believe that the only viewers the estate agent got round only wanted to rip the place apart. Apparently no one wanted my house the way it is.

Very mixed experiences then! Decided to go with the popular high st EA in the end as he has a very good reputation locally. He’s coming to do photos today and assures me they can start viewings as soon as we are ready. This moving malarkey is so stressful as we haven’t even got started yet!

Houses sell themselves. As long as they are on rightmove. It’s a myth that estate agents sell houses. In the UK anyone can put on a suit and become an estate agents, as many do. They need no qualifications, know no more about property than you can learn from google. No one is going to spend a figure sum on a house because of anything the estate agent. Price it right, and even a hamster could sell your house.

I agree with sst1234, it’s all about the house and the price. We were house hunting for about 2 years, some agents were better than others but it never influenced my decisions. We’ve bought our house from the local agent. He was flexible in terms of availability for viewings, he calmly answered all our questions, he quickly communicated everything with sellers. But don’t get me wrong we’ve bought this house because we’ve liked the house not the agent.
Some agents from the big popular agencies were annoying and pompous. They were always in a rush as they had a lot of properties in their books and couldn’t answer even simple questions. They didn’t know who owned the drive, argued about central heating in a house without gas, counted bedrooms wrong and so on. But some were absolutely fine.

I used a site called Get Agent that ranked our local agents by customer ratings. Took the fuss out of choosing and our agent was great

A lot of agents don't/won't use GetAgent, as GetAgent require payment of 25% of the agents fee for any introduction.

We went with a £99 company and a couple of pictures of the exterior of the house and garden (no interior pictures) taken on a iPhone. It is quite an expensive house (5 bed detached with a very large plot commutable to London.
Took 3 offers in the first 2 days and 3 days later formally accepted one of them.

All my EA did was chew potential viewers ears off about how many walls could be knocked down and what could be built on the plot.

I have used purple bricks twice before and using it again on behalf of my grandad without any complaints. Selling one of the places within 24hours. And I like that I can manage everything through the app. I felt very in control of everything and I passed on to my agent with them to help negotiations on another place.
We never used their solicitors though. Always a local solicitor.

An EA isn't just about marketing the property.

They really come into their own in keeping a chain together, moving forwards and negotiating when something gets tricky.

It can be really helpful if one EA has more than one sale in a chain.

Ours would have gone badly awry without the constant intervention of 3 EAs.