London zone 1 estate agent fees

[tiredoflondonbutnotlife]

I'm selling my central London flat. Can anyone tell me the real rates of commission estate agents are charging for flats in London zone 1 please? I'm speaking to some at the moment who are quoting 2.5% + VAT and I wondered if there was some wiggle room. Thanks.

Our experience of using central London EAs (Savills, Knight Frank and Dexters) is that they do not haggle and we had to accept 2.5% plus VAT 3 years ago. It seems really high compared to other EA fees you hear about but I guess they do have massive overheads where they have offices in central London.

And to be fair we did receive an excellent service from Savills for a difficult sale so in the end didn't resent paying the fees.

Edited to add - it's always worth trying to haggle but in our case anyway it didn't work.

Thanks @Twiglets1 . Appreciate your reply. I’m wondering if the less well known agents might shift on fees. I tried to sell my flat last year through Knight Frank and while they were charming, they were ineffective, hence trying to go again.

Smaller EAs might be more receptive to shifting on fees or offering lower fees.

I wouldn’t advise online EAs though, I think it’s important to choose an EA that only gets paid when (if) the property gets sold

Agreed. I have no intention of using an online agent.

Very interesting - was told 2% for zone 2 and not sure why it should be more in zone 1!

I guess they think as the properties are more expensive that we're made of money and can pay them more commission @lataraw! 😬

Does anyone else have experience of Zone 1 fees? It'd be good to get a bit more of a consensus.

Let them go to sealed bids 🤣 and choose the best, with exclusivity for 6 weeks, and no sale no fee.
Don't discount smaller agencies, as they'll quite likely be happy to put in more legwork, to get market share.
Let them almost persuade you to sell, then they've already come to term with a "try harder" approach.

Haha I like that idea @SunDash 😂

I sold with ludlowthomson in 2021/22

I negotiated fees so I’d pay more the more they got me for my flat. In terms of how good the estate agents were, ehhh, it depends on who you get, but overall estate agents are very good at bending the truth (even when this is not necessary, but they just can’t help themselves) and using your stressed situation to their advantage.
The guy who took the photos was amazing though - although I believe he was a contractor so no connecting with LT

1.5% + VAT for sale price up to £365,000

• 1.6% + VAT for sale £365,001 to £375,000

1.75% + VAT for offers over £375,000.

My flat was in zone 2 fyi but it shouldn’t really matter which zone.

2.5% is ridiculous. We're zone 2/3 and have just negotiated 1% with Winkworth. It's a big expensive house and even with 1% they will make a very large commission! In fact all of the agents where we are - in a nice part of north east London £boffered us 1%, with a little bit of negotiation.

Just sold our flat in Zone 1 and we negotiated down to 1.85% for sole agent (Dexters, Hamptons, KF agreed to this, Savills and Foxtons wouldn't move from 2.5%). Price slightly over 1 mil.

This is so helpful thank you. Our flat is in the same region as your property @lilydragon, price-wise, so it's good to get some comparables.

@Greenleaf2, do you think that as your house is so expensive they're still happy to make a decent fee on it and can therefore agree to a lower commission rate? My flat is probably worth £1m-1.1m.

I think it's just really competitive for estate agents. There are a whole load of them where we are - we spoke to four or five and they were all prepared to cut their fee with a bit of negotiation. Definitely worth a try!

Thank you @Greenleaf2.