Our mistrust of Yopa!

[vendi]

DCs left home, one of us had an inheritance. DH & I have £800k cash to spend --don't come for me, we know how lucky we are!.

We are moving out of area, happy to take time off to look at properties.
Have seen a handful of house we want to see, in the right area, one house we like is on with Yopa.

We were already put off of Yopa for a few reasons; one house we like is on the Yopa site, it doesn't appear on Rightmove as it is incorrectly labelled i.e. it doesn't appear as having a garden on RMove, even though it very obviously does.

Yopa description is non-existent. 5 bed house, no room sizes and vague description of downstairs rooms. No floor plan or room measurements.

Contacted Yopa to arrange a viewing, after 2 weeks of back and forth, they can't come up with a day, any day!

We would like the owners to know how crap their agent is being. Though we accept that we cannot do this. House has already been on the market for 5 months.

Area we are looking at is sluggish atm, Yopa are unlikely to be overwhelmed with viewings.

Does anyone have any good experiences of Yopa? Or bad?

you could put a note through the door telling them you are trying to arrange a viewing?

When I was looking Yopa were shocking. I had a viewing but by the time I got there an offer had been accepted but they forgot to tell me.

I'm sure there are other properties you like.

I would say the owner isn’t bothered about selling. Using sites like this is half hearted. Keen people use a decent agent. No wonder it’s stuck. Do you really want to get involved with this? They won’t be looking to hard to move I would guess. They are tight.

Thank you for your responses, currently we haven't really dealt with Yopa. It's like they CBA.
DH & I both have that gut feeling that it's not right IYKWIM?

This particular house has a very large garden, great views from the front and a listed estate at the rear being intentionally vague. That won't be developed, even if it was built on, the garden is big enough that we wouldn't be immediately overlooked.

On this particular house we would want to do work to suit our needs and taste, it is plenty under budget to cover that.

From the look of the house, we think it's a sale on behalf of someone elderly, or who has passed away.

In normal circumstances we might consider a note through the door.
As we think it is a sale on behalf of someone, you never know who might pick a note up @IPartridge understandably we don't want to piss anyone off. In the area we want to move to.

@user1471538283 that's the feeling we're getting from Yopa, that they're crap.
You're right, there are plenty of houses for us to look at.
It's a shame, it seems that it's not meant for us.

As we think it's a sale on behalf of we are assuming that is why they went with the cheapest agent @TizerorFizz.

Like most people, we struggled financially when our DCs were small. We have always worked hard and never had this kind of money, or choices like this before.
We have paid off the DCs student loans and have a decent house deposit for them all,

My experience of a different online agent is that they can be crap - having got some money upfront they are less motivated to sell than a traditional EA who normally only gets paid at exchange of contracts.

It’s poor judgement on the part of the sellers to skimp on paying EAs fees thus making potential buyers lives more difficult. They won’t achieve the highest price they could that way.

I would put a note through the door but phrase it politely as you don’t know who could be reading it. Probably unlikely to be the YOPA salesperson as they seem so unmotivated to sell the house but you never know!

I viewed a house through Yopa. Took ages to get the floor plan (lots of pestering), had my offer refused but no attempt by the agent to suggest renegotiation, as if the agent wasn't bothered about selling (sellers had no other offers). Same thing happened with another house and the owner eventually took it off the market.

Tried to view another house recently, but no response when I requested to view it after another appointment in the same area - by the time they responded, I was no longer in the area and I'd been put off by it (and that had no floorplan either).

I feel that maybe they're only interested in buyers who want mortgage advice through them, to make extra money? Surely if they don't sell your hone, you have to pay to renew the contract, so maybe it's not in their interest to sell it?

All the homes I viewed were delusional prices too in comparison to the trend for the street.

When we were looking, we saw a lovely house with a massive extension on Yopa. It was advertised probably 20k too low for what it was worth!!

We pushed to view before the opening day as it was comfortably under budget and we wanted to offer on the spot if it was as good as the pictures showed it to be.

Turned out the agent was an acquaintance/friend of the sellers and he'd booked in a friend of his to view it just before us.
We offered 20k above asking. He immediately said the other buyers had offered exactly the same 🤨 This went on for a few days - anything we offered, his friends had magically offered the exact. same. amount.
We walked away as weren't prepared to go above a certain price. The sale price ended up being 5k lower than our highest offer 😂
We ended up buying a much better house. Though that was through purple bricks and i would NEVER recommend anyone to buy through them if the vendor uses their conveyancer as OMG they were terrible!!!!

Thank you everyone, seriously.

We haven't bought a house for over a decade.
Since then the buying and selling landscape has changed.

We are buying and selling in a slow market, which doesn't help things.

This particular house; there is plenty we would want to do to it.
We think it is an elderly or legacy sale, the decor is very dated.
Downstairs there is a bedroom with an en suite bathroom room. In it the shower is one of those walk in showers which is (excuse my ignorance) a cross between a shower and a sit up bath. Adjoining the downstairs bedroom is a room with therapy devices inside.

We would take out the downstairs bedroom etc. entirely.
The upstairs layout is unusual, we would want to change it to be more logical.

The house is in the right place for us, has all of the potential, and plenty of space to build a double garage amongst other things.

@Twiglets1 as a legacy or OAP sale I understand them wanting to keep costs down.
In reality it is a bad idea IMO.

Given the changes we want to make, a floor plan is vital to us @amandaleeds, so I appreciate you sharing your experience.

Ugh @JumpingPaperback that's very poor behaviour. We can't be doing with that!

We are lucky, I didn't realise that it would be difficult to find a home with cash! Within our price range there are 122 houses on Rightmove within a 40 mile radius. If you take out the completely dilapidated, the listed buildings and others that are not want we want, we are left with surprisingly few problems.

We do know that these are nice problems to have.

I have viewed houses through yopa and bought my current property through PB.
Also sold a property through yopa some time ago - as a seller I would say that I definitely wouldn’t use yopa again. we may as well not have used anyone as we did all viewings ourselves etc

Is there an option on the site to make direct contact with someone to make an appointment? Even if it is a solicitor for the estate

anything we viewed through yopa seemed to be air bnb’s

I recently viewed a house with yopa. It sent me a message chain directly with the owner to organise a viewing.
They're cheap for a reason (and charge you £84 each to check your identity if you want to put an offer in!!).

Yopa, we wanted to view a property on with them,booked a viewing drove 40mins to the address, only for Yopa to cancel the viewing 5mins before we were about to view, no apology, no explanation, no offer to make another appointment. Honestly would even bother trying to view a property with them again.

Of course @vendi everyone wants to keep costs down but using a company like YOPA is a false economy in many cases, including this one.

I don’t see what else you can try really apart from a note through the door & another attempt to get an appointment to view via YOPA even if it is weeks away. And to keep looking for alternatives in the hope that something else comes up that is less trouble. Good Luck and I hope you can buy something soon.

Ignoring yopas alleged crapness.
(I used a similar company to sell and it was a breeze tbh)

If you like the house put a note through the door with your number on and explain you want to view and cant agree and time with yooa so reached out directly.

We viewed a house through them last year and I was really impressed. We were expecting a very poor experience but it was up there with the most efficient and even fully knowledgeable about the house.

The EA showing us around was married to the regional manager.

They are franchised, so obviously quality will vary.

She took her job very seriously and was very good. So, we at least got lucky with this regional responsibility EA couple. I would suggest trying to track down the regional area manager.

We bought through our local YOPA agent and she was fab, ours was one of 7 offers on the house so she definitely did her job. Must vary regionally

I’m sure it does vary depending on the agent but on the whole online EAs like YOPA get worse reviews so it’s still a poor choice for most people imo.

I have a large deposit and chain free and have the same experience buying a home. Then on the rare occasion something decent comes up, I'm being outbid by people in the same boat with more cash 😬 I've tried looking at the very top of my budget but it just buys a bigger home which I don't need, and still doesn't tick enough basic boxes.

@amandaleeds I'm sorry, that's really tough on you. In the past that has happened to us and it can be very frustrating.

We have just had an offer on our current house, there is a fair market for family homes like ours locally.
As we thought it would take longer to sell we haven't looked at anything yet.

Though we do know our prospective area well, we are looking around 80 miles from where we live now.
The market in the area we want to move to is flat, every house has been on the market for months. I think the likelihood of people outbidding us is low.

Next weekend we are going there to stay, we have booked 9 viewings. If we see The One we will put an offer in.

We are going to put a note through the door of the YOPA house and see what happens.

Thank you for sharing your experiences, good and bad