Online Estate Agents -would you recommend?

johnno71

I helped my aunt with a sale and purchase last year. Purchase was through a local agent, but the sale was through www.househop.co.uk

I have to say they were excellent and basically did everything for us except for the viewings. One of the earlier posters was talking about not getting feedback with online agents, but that wasn't true in this case. We got regular feedback and they did the negotiations for us which took a lot of the pressure off.

Darcie

Hi. Interested in this thread as I am thinking of using housenetwork in the near future. A house near mine has just sold through them. If I do decide to use them, I am happy to keep you posted on my progress (good or bad) if anybody is interested.

Yorkshirelady56

We recently sold our home via Homesdotcom an internet estate agent. We paid £250 in advance but did not expect to sell the house as quickly as we did. It was on sale for a couple of months until the first viewing. After two viewings we accepted an offer. We were very pleasantly surprised with the excellent service. It was certianly on par with the service we received when we bought the property when we paid 1.50% commission. Would highly recommend using an internet estate agent.

BertieUK

Estate Agents v On-line agents....

The third party can be looked upon as a mediator between the seller/buyer touching on issues that may otherwise not arise.

The attraction of on-line agents is the vast difference in the overall costings, so in order to give more oppertunity to the High Street Estate Agent what would you say would be a minimal fee that would be accepted percentage wise? Taking into consideration that the seller would be prepared to conduct viewings where needed.

Do they have a set scale or are costs negotiable for services provided.

googler

BertieUK wrote: »

Estate Agents v On-line agents....

........ in order to give more oppertunity to the High Street Estate Agent what would you say would be a minimal fee that would be accepted percentage wise? Taking into consideration that the seller would be prepared to conduct viewings where needed.

Do they have a set scale or are costs negotiable for services provided.

You've posted this in two separate threads, but I'll only address it once.

Any business has to gain income to cover their expenses, plus some extra to pay those within the business. This applies everywhere, not just in Estate Agency.

When purchasing a manufactured item, the retail price of the item includes the manufacturing cost of the item, plus an allowance for the outgoings which can't be assigned to that one item; general promotion of the company, PR, local taxes, legal representation etc. This is all rolled into the price, and any attempt to negotiate a reduced price on the basis that you only want to pay for the costs directly related to 'your item' will likely be rejected.

You appear to want to pay only the costs attributable to your sale, to your property, but as I said on the other thread, much of what the high-street agent does can't directly be allocated to specific properties. They're expected to provide free valuations to clients who have no intention of using their services, and merely want free advice to set their price for a private sale or for one using an online agent, for instance. The free work provided to the public has to be paid for. The business has to cover the cost of this from somewhere, and the only source of income to do this from (in general) is the fee income from successful sales.

Minimum fees will vary up and down the country. In E&W, the OFT determined average fees were 1.6% a few years ago, with those in Scotland at 1.1%. Some agents operate a minimum flat fee if the house price is low enough that a percentage-based fee is uneconomic.

BertieUK

googler wrote: »

You've posted this in two separate threads, but I'll only address it once.

Any business has to gain income to cover their expenses, plus some extra to pay those within the business. This applies everywhere, not just in Estate Agency.

When purchasing a manufactured item, the retail price of the item includes the manufacturing cost of the item, plus an allowance for the outgoings which can't be assigned to that one item; general promotion of the company, PR, local taxes, legal representation etc. This is all rolled into the price, and any attempt to negotiate a reduced price on the basis that you only want to pay for the costs directly related to 'your item' will likely be rejected.

You appear to want to pay only the costs attributable to your sale, to your property, but as I said on the other thread, much of what the high-street agent does can't directly be allocated to specific properties. They're expected to provide free valuations to clients who have no intention of using their services, and merely want free advice to set their price for a private sale or for one using an online agent, for instance. The free work provided to the public has to be paid for. The business has to cover the cost of this from somewhere, and the only source of income to do this from (in general) is the fee income from successful sales.

Minimum fees will vary up and down the country. In E&W, the OFT determined average fees were 1.6% a few years ago, with those in Scotland at 1.1%. Some agents operate a minimum flat fee if the house price is low enough that a percentage-based fee is uneconomic.

It was our intension to set the asking price at the local valuation figure attained within the last sales of properties that were similar to ours, rather than getting an Estate Agent to come and give us what would be a similar price.

I understand what you are saying but only wished the EA to do minimal work which you will probably say was not advisable. I wondered if this was a working proposition.

draper3000

Hey.. my first post on the forum...

Just read through all the replies on this post...

We've just got back from 5 days visiting South Devon and viewing property. We've always planned to move there and my work have given me the green light to work from home and can now move where ever we like (currently in staines). So a few days spent surfing mixed with visiting friends for new year and viewing potential property and narrowing down our search to one town.

We need to do a little TLC to our 3 bed semi but would then consider selling using the online estate agent option. An aunt of mine we visited in Devon sold her house successfully via an online agent (not sure who), and it was all done in 1 week so obviously highly recommended the process. She paid £550 in total (or there abouts), she also said she should'nt have bothered paying the £40 extra for a forsale sign as she lives in the middle of now where. (it helped us find her house though...she moves in February, we'd definitely get one ourselves as we get a lot of traffic and people walking by... ).

Anyway... we've got home this evening and we're on the hunt for our preferred online agent, my wife found housesimple.co.uk which looks good and professional but its the first we've fully looked at.

Is there a current leader in internet estate agents?... not the cheapest but the most professional respected?

Also does anyone know if they will continue marketing if you accept an offer, take it off the market but then the sale falls through?

Vikingfan

Stay away from Househop I've just had an email from them they have ceased trading and have taken £400 from me. Fingers crossed I get some back

NeilProud

I found Emoov to be very unprofessional. The details they produced for the advert were full of errors and they didn't seem to care when I told them. The details were corrected - eventually, but the inaccurate floorplan never was. Don't expect any advice or help from Emoov on the value of your property or much feedback. Some viewings were set up but I found that Emoov ignored simple instructions, e.g. I told them we could only take viewings at weekends or after working hours (as long as it would be light) but they consistently rang me and tried to set up viewings for 9 am the next day for instance and when I said this wasn't possible and asked them to rearrange it, I heard nothing more, often for weeks. It was difficult to speak to the same person twice and although I gave them my email, work number, home number and mobile to be used in that order of preference, it was pretty much random which one they chose. All in all Emoov were very frustrating to deal with and I wouldn't recommend them at all. Perhaps we made a mistake in going for option A as that meant they got their money upfront - in retrospect not a good idea. I don't know where the positive reviews of Emoov come from - some busy staff ? To me, they didn't seem to be finding buyers.

Dan-Dan

sometimes , you get what you pay (up front in the case of online EA) for

Does a buyer , NEED the reassurance of working through an estate agent with real tangible offices and real tangible staff , because after all , if your a buyer , it costs nothing to buy a house either through an online or high street EA , and some people , they dont want to deal with the vendor , at all , in any way , we used a local EA , an independent with a good reputation , if we had stuck our house online and did viewings ourselves , would we have sold it , would we have attracted the buyers that we did ?

There is no way of knowing , but for sure , the only option where you pay something with no way of getting it back is through the online option