Evaluating Estate Agents

reheat

I've been looking on Rightmove to try and get some idea of how good some of the local estate agents are. I can see that for four of them:-

EA1 has 68 properties total,17 of them sold stc.
EA2 65 total, 9 sstc
EA3 147 total, 90 sstc
EA4 63 total, 11 sstc

This suggests to me that EA3 has sold a high proportion of the properties on their books, and that EA1 isn't doing too bad. But I'm also wary that things may not be as simple as it might seem? Is EA1's success due to them being brilliant at doing their job in the best interests of their clients? Or is it due to them convincing sellers to pitch their prices low, so the EA can get a high throughput?

If one EA sells twice as many properties as another, but for £20K less per house than the other EA, they may earn slightly less per property, but will rake in much more per month.

Any thoughts on this please?

girl_withno_name

I'd have to agree with you - this won't give the full picture, although could provide some indications!

For example, EA3's 90 sstc properties could have been hanging around on Rightmove for months and the remaining properties could have been sitting on their books for a long time... whereas EA2 or EA4 might have cleared properties off Rightmove quicker, and their 9 or 11 properties might be from the last few weeks!

(Note: This may not be an accurate representation of how Rightmove is actually managed...)

Better_Days

You may also find it helpful to look at http://www.home.co.uk/

You can search for agents in your area and the website gives you the average price of the property for each agent, ranking of the EA, how many properties they have on the market, and the 'time on the market' - the latter is an indication of how quickly property is sold. Long TOM can be indicator of higher pricing (or vendors stuck in 2007 valuations) and short TOM is an indicator of lower pricing.

This is an expample of a search for Ipswich
http://www.home.co.uk/search/agents.htm?location=ip2

Zoopla also lets you search by 'most reduced' which can give you an idea of agents who value high to get business and then when there is little or no interest, ask the vendors to reduce the price.

The more info you gather the more you can get a feel for the business model of your local EA's and which will fit your needs best according to location, price range, quality of details, demographics, if you need a quick sale or not, etc

DVardysShadow

reheat wrote: »

This suggests to me that EA3 has sold a high proportion of the properties on their books, and that EA1 isn't doing too bad. But I'm also wary that things may not be as simple as it might seem? Is EA1's success due to them being brilliant at doing their job in the best interests of their clients? Or is it due to them convincing sellers to pitch their prices low, so the EA can get a high throughput?

You may just be tracking a meaningless statistic. Some may just be slack in clearing their listings. Some like to leave sold listings to give the impression that houses are flying off the shelves like hotcakes.

And some may like to keep sold properties on their books to attract sellers by making their ratio of sold to for sale look good.

And if you start publicising that you think it is a good indicator to track and a few more agree with you here, then they will all start fiddling this figure to make themselves look better, if they don't already.

girl_withno_name

Maybe a better indicator would be to restrict your searches to within the last 14 days? The issue then being that you've a much smaller and hence unreliably sample size... any difference in sold %s (which could equate to one or two properties) could simply be random and the result of "best" EA could alter month on month using this measure.

Something else to consider is the type of property each EA tends to market - myself and a few colleagues are house hunting at the moment and we seem to find that houses matching our wishlist are normally advertised by the same one or two estate agents.

Do you or any friends / family know the area? Reputation among locals could be worth considering, as well as those dreaded fees of course (with only 4 EAs under your consideration, would it be worth getting valuations and quotes from all?)

reheat

Better_Days wrote: »

You may also find it helpful to look at http://www.home.co.uk/

You can search for agents in your area and the website gives you the average price of the property for each agent, ranking of the EA, how many properties they have on the market, and the 'time on the market' - the latter is an indication of how quickly property is sold. Long TOM can be indicator of higher pricing (or vendors stuck in 2007 valuations) and short TOM is an indicator of lower pricing.

This is an expample of a search for Ipswich
http://www.home.co.uk/search/agents.htm?location=ip2

Zoopla also lets you search by 'most reduced' which can give you an idea of agents who value high to get business and then when there is little or no interest, ask the vendors to reduce the price.

The more info you gather the more you can get a feel for the business model of your local EA's and which will fit your needs best according to location, price range, quality of details, demographics, if you need a quick sale or not, etc

Better Days, that really is incredibly helpful. Many thanks. Done a search on Zoopla round our local area, in our price band, and then sorted by 'most reduced'. A real revelation! We have several estate agents doing valuations this weekend, and one of them (the branch we would be dealing with) shows up in at least 3/4 of the properties that have been reduced, some by massive margins.

I do appreciate that all EAs will encounter vendors who insist on seriously overpricing their properties, but that would hit all the EAs pretty evenly. So I'm interested now to see if this EA comes in with a bloated valuation to reel us in or not. If not then it presumably means they are just not very good at selling houses. Interestingly this EA's fees are quite high; my initial contact with them suggesting they made no apologies for this as they provide an excellent service. But another way of looking at it could be they need the higher fees to cover their poor performance! And they are fixed price fees, based on initial market value!! Very enlightening.

Your comment on business model is very salient. A model that majors on high property turnover would very likely give an EA higher profits, but could cost their vendors dearly if they are not desperate to sell quickly.

reheat

DVardysShadow wrote: »

You may just be tracking a meaningless statistic. Some may just be slack in clearing their listings. Some like to leave sold listings to give the impression that houses are flying off the shelves like hotcakes.

And some may like to keep sold properties on their books to attract sellers by making their ratio of sold to for sale look good.

And if you start publicising that you think it is a good indicator to track and a few more agree with you here, then they will all start fiddling this figure to make themselves look better, if they don't already.

I think you could be right on all counts

googler

reheat wrote: »

Better Days, that really is incredibly helpful. Many thanks. Done a search on Zoopla round our local area, in our price band, and then sorted by 'most reduced'. A real revelation! We have several estate agents doing valuations this weekend, and one of them (the branch we would be dealing with) shows up in at least 3/4 of the properties that have been reduced, some by massive margins.

This is only relevant if ALL EAs in your area advertise on Zoopla; do they? Around my way, very few of them do so.

reheat

girl_withno_name wrote: »

Maybe a better indicator would be to restrict your searches to within the last 14 days? The issue then being that you've a much smaller and hence unreliably sample size... any difference in sold %s (which could equate to one or two properties) could simply be random and the result of "best" EA could alter month on month using this measure.

Something else to consider is the type of property each EA tends to market - myself and a few colleagues are house hunting at the moment and we seem to find that houses matching our wishlist are normally advertised by the same one or two estate agents.

Do you or any friends / family know the area? Reputation among locals could be worth considering, as well as those dreaded fees of course (with only 4 EAs under your consideration, would it be worth getting valuations and quotes from all?)

Yes, we've been using the search engines to help identify agents who definitley do not sell much of our kind of property, to help eliminate some non-starters. We are quite new to this area, having relocated a couple of years back from outside the region. But it does mean we have recent experience as buyers, and as a first pass we are looking at ones we felt worked hard when trying to sell to us. Also avoiding ones we felt were in bed with local developers etc.

I'll see how it goes with the 4 (well, 3 now I rather think), and if none really seem to shine then will explore more. But am also keenly aware the spring market is probably underway (much more activity on Rightmove etc), and keen to not waste too much time. As always, need to balance conflicting issues!

reheat

googler wrote: »

This is only relevant if ALL EAs in your area advertise on Zoopla; do they? Around my way, very few of them do so.

Very good point - too easy to assume they all do these days, but not necessarily so of course.

Edit: In fact one of my 4 do not show up in zoola.

Hoof_Hearted

Why not save a load of money and try an online agent?