Not happy

stevenandselina

I'm a FTB and so far have put in 2 offers on 2 different houses. Both times i have gone about 20K under the asking price of 140k. In both cases the estate agent has never got back to me about if the offer has been accepted so i have hyad to phone them to find out. I had the feeling that the

Then yesterday i had a viewing arrange at 1:30 at an empty house. When we arrived the estate agent was showing another couple round and told us to wait outside (lucky it was a nice day). 15 mins later our arranged time he showed us round but only after what i thought of him making us wait outside, he wasn't very friendly after that lol

QTPie

At the moment, a lot of estate agents lack charm or manners: they do what they need to, bare minimum, and that is it. Maybe business is so bad, they only have the time to focus on the "here and now" and not for the pleasantaries of what they should do...

I posted a thread a week or so ago asking if estate agents tend to contact the people that they have sold a house for at/after completion (just to thank them and congratulate them). We completed on sellling our house a couple of weeks ago (handing £7.5k in commission to the EA) and not a call/email/nod from them...

I guess with EA's, you don't tend to get a lot of "return business", so many of them do not bother building good relations with their clients... (as you would in most other lines of work).

As a buyer, you are stuffed - no matter how they act... IF the property you "reallt want" is marketed only with them, then you have little choice... (unless you cut off your nose to spite your face).

There seem to be some good EAs/ex-EAs on here... just they may not represent the majority...

QT

nementai

I'm afraid that we had much the same experience.
In the end, after 436 viewings, we found some companies and branches who were professional and helpful, and chased them every few days for new properties.
If something had come along on rightmove that was with one of the bad EAs, we would have gone for it, but reluctantly, as I have to say they do cause stress.
Find the good ones and butter them up - tell them about your bad experiences (drunk estate agent falling down stairs anyone?!) and reassure them that they are the company you want to buy through. It may help you to get on their 'hot' list.
One of the last houses we viewed (before offering through a very helpful agent who has worked hard to make our purchase easy) the EA turned up late and proceeded to park on the opposite side of the narrow road to us, blocking the road from use entirely.
When we pointed it out politely, he told us to move our car...
That was a bad viewing - he told us off for going into the rooms in the 'wrong' order, and ended when we pointed at the huge cracks all across the back of the house, inside and out.
He said "it's nothing structural". We said, "oh, that's good to hear, a surveyor has already looked at it then?" to have him reply that no, he just knew it was fine.
Right...
We left pronto and didn't take his calls.
(Realise that turned into a rant...sorry)
There are good EAs out there though - you'll find one!

R&C

We are dealing with a nightmare agent at the moment too! they never get back to us... we've asked them to submit an offer only to find 2 days later that no offer was submitted because they want to speak to our IFA beforehand, and to our housing association to check for certain that we have a buyer for our current property. I don't mind that they have to check these things, but i'd rather they called us to ask for the deatils rather than waste 48hours until we call them to check up. I wonder how long they'd have taken to call us?

They've been a nightmare all the way through to be honest, and I hate the fact that we have to deal with them.

stevenandselina

We are based in medway and the estate agents are:

Ward and partners : Keep wanting us to come in and see there IFA and don't ever phone us back

Your Move : Made us wait outside, rude and never got back to us.

Spicer McCol; ; Amazing estate agents, really friendly and phone us nearly every day to see how we are getting on, shame the other 2 aren't like these