Asking Estate Agent what we need to do to get ready to go on market - pointless exercise?

[HangerLaneGyratorySystem]

We had an agent round and talked a lot about getting his opinion on how much work we needed to do before we even get the photos taken. I was trying to bring home to STBExH that we are going to lose money on the sale if we don't do some painting and clearing up. EA said everything was fine and didn't even notice water damage on some ceilings, a light fitting hanging out of ceiling, let alone stained paintwork and little things like that. Didn't even recommend weeding the gardens. Only thing he seemed interested in was moving some furniture out of the rooms, so that was his only suggestion. H doesn't want to do anything at all and the agent's attitude simply told him what he wanted to hear.

I think its just common sense to do this stuff but I am sure I've read here before that all agents do this, that they just want you on the market and a few thousand lost here or there makes no real difference to their commission. Have others had a similar experience? Is this reason enough to avoid this agent or is it just par for the course?

I'd look for anothr agent. We found one that was very helpful- saved us thousands on work we'd thought was needed and was not needed, and we made much more than we spent on the work they did suggest doing.

[In our case, apart form the decluttering we knew we'd need to do, they said, don't redo the bathroom, as we'd intended, because any buyer will do that anyway, so we'd be wasting our money. But do remove the (expensive) wood kitchen units (which we'd thought would be a selling point) and replace with basic gloss white- at the price point of that house, that was what buyers wanted at the time. Which we did, and brought our expensive wooden ones here with us. The kitchen was a big saving all round as we didn't have to buy new units for here, and the house sold for a much higher price than the original 'as it stands' valuation- and a good few thousand more than it cost us to do the kitchen and other little jobs like refreshing paint and some new carpets upstairs- but we did do all the work ourselves. The house got 3 asking price offers in the first week.]