Help choosing London estate agent - zone 2

[Troubh]

2 bed flat in zone 2.

Foxtons - 2.5% fee and 14 week contract, said to market at 650 and be happy with 600 - appreciated that it was a period property and said they have lots of buyers in area looking for this and could convince people looking at new builds to check it out

Acorn - 1.5% fee and 6 week contract, said to market at 575 and be happy with 560 - one person does all viewings and they seemed more considerate of our time, but got era of build wrong and said people looking at new builds wouldn't be interested (lots of new builds here hence relevance)

We've had another valuation for 525-599 (which is a super unhelpful range!) but have discounted the agency as unresponsive but including as helpful to understand valuations...

Not in a huge rush and no chain.

Sounds about right. Foxtons & Dexters are well known to overvalue to get listings. I gather they have rather a high viewings-to-offers ratio.

If you want to actually sell it, price sensibly and use Acorn or a good local agent. If I wanted to try my luck on an aggressive valuation I'd probably go for KFH over Foxtons. Though right now is not the market for it. (btw don't touch Dexters with a bargepole - they are strictly for the greedy or the gullible)

Watch the weekly UK Property Market Stats show on YT.

Zoom to the end section where they review the market for a given town that week (Brighton and Hove this week).

Learn about how effective or ineffective EA's relatively can be.

Ask your EA's to present their TwentyEA Insights data to you so that you can see how they have performed versus their competitors.

Don't accept a contract longer than 8 weeks. If they can't sell it in that period then they are no good. But accept that you may need to pay a slightly higher fee to get a good EA.

Foxtons are well known to overvalue properties so I would assume that the second EA is being more realistic at 575k.

It sounds nonsense to me that they could get people who want a new build property to look at and potentially buy a period property. They can't make people do anything, everyone just chooses what to view from the photos/descriptions on Rightmove.

They also have a lower fee and a nice small contract period so I would be inclined to go with them.

Dexters are awful, I agree @pancakerobot

Thanks all, sounds like it'll be acorn!

I would agree to not go with the likes of Foxtons or Dexters. They over value to get your business and will then have you reducing the asking price within four weeks. Then you’ve missed the boat with the initial flurry of viewings in terms of getting offers. This happened to us and we ended up having to come off of market for three months and then go back on.