housenetwork - a review

WallyBird

Hi to all old friends on this thread, thanks for your support and all the beers!

Well, we have sold our house: in the end it went through quickly, because our buyer needed to get out of his old house in a hurry. We have been very happy with how Housenetwork handled it all, and more than a bit smug at saving so much money compared to a conventional estate agent. Their lawyers have been great too, which is why we have used them for buying our new house as well.

I would definitely use HN again, although I hope we will not want to move house for a long time now!!!

WB.

Canucklehead

WallyBird wrote: »

Hi to all old friends on this thread, thanks for your support and all the beers!

Well, we have sold our house: in the end it went through quickly, because our buyer needed to get out of his old house in a hurry. We have been very happy with how Housenetwork handled it all, and more than a bit smug at saving so much money compared to a conventional estate agent. Their lawyers have been great too, which is why we have used them for buying our new house as well.

I would definitely use HN again, although I hope we will not want to move house for a long time now!!!

WB.

Good evening: excellent news:beer:... I agree it is a great feeling!

Canucklehead

not_loaded

WallyBird wrote: »

Hi to all old friends on this thread, thanks for your support and all the beers!
Well, we have sold our house: in the end it went through quickly, because our buyer needed to get out of his old house in a hurry. We have been very happy with how Housenetwork handled it all, and more than a bit smug at saving so much money compared to a conventional estate agent. Their lawyers have been great too, which is why we have used them for buying our new house as well.
I would definitely use HN again, although I hope we will not want to move house for a long time now!!!
WB.

At the moment we are selling through HN with no serious problems. The sale appears to be progressing well through HouseNetwork Conveyancing which is in fact Premier Property Lawyers. They’re very focused and well ahead of the other solicitors involved at the moment.

I’ve read the positives and the negatives here with interest.

When I said ‘no serious problems’, that refers to the one-time mistake of our account manager taking us off the market too early. I’d been assured that we would remain on the market until we requested not to be, and somebody ‘automatically’ took us off immediately on offer acceptance.

I have to say I consider the HN experience good overall, and astounding value for money, compared with the alternatives available. I have to wonder a bit about possible missed viewings seeing the comments above, but we’ve averaged one viewing per week in all the time we’ve been with them.

beccad

We've had some issues with their conveyencing arm. We're not using them but our buyers are, and they did sweet FA for five weeks after the offer was put in, saying they'd sent through a list of questions from the buyer to our solicitor when they hadn't (and repeatedly saying they'd done this). It miraculously was sorted out when we chased, chased, chased, became a total pain in the !!!! and complained to a manager within the sales bit of HN!

Ours is a straight forward sale, FTB and we aren't buying anywhere, so should have been done in the seven weeks it's been since we accepted their offer. Unfortunately it's now going to be August before we complete because we're going away for five weeks from next week. It's not the end of the world waiting that long, but it could have been done and dusted by now, and we're going to have to arrange a house-sitter to come in whilst we're away, because the house insurance requires that we don't leave the property uninhabited for the length of time we're away.

In terms of selling, we've not had any particular issues. Our account manager is a bit difficult to get hold of as she's so busy - we normally have to leave a message and she calls back a few hours later. Perhaps they could employ a couple more people. They're in danger of becoming a victim of their success I think...

You certainly get what you pay for, but having saved close to £5k, it's worth it!

Grolsch30

The only Issue I have had and I can't see it being HN fault is in getting any kind of feedback from viewers.
We have had 4 viewings but none seem to want to engage in any feedback whatsoever!
HN according to their input in our members section state that they keep emailing/phoning viewer for feedback but to no avail.

Does anyone know what a general rough average is for viewing figures, we have had 4 viewings in 3 weeks and considering the economic climate etc would you say it's kinda ok?

letstravel

interesting discussion you have here:)

not_loaded

Grolsch30 wrote: »

The only Issue I have had and I can't see it being HN fault is in getting any kind of feedback from viewers.
We have had 4 viewings but none seem to want to engage in any feedback whatsoever!
HN according to their input in our members section state that they keep emailing/phoning viewer for feedback but to no avail.
Does anyone know what a general rough average is for viewing figures, we have had 4 viewings in 3 weeks and considering the economic climate etc would you say it's kinda ok?

Our feedback sheet online has in general been filled in for almost every viewer. I suppose though, if you think about it, feedback is almost certain to be along the lines of ‘nice house, shame about the nuclear reactor’. In other words, ‘I don’t want it and I’ll say something valid or invalid to prove it’.

Rough average for us is one per week, but I suppose that’ll vary a lot according to desirability, pricing etc.

We had an early offer from an unproceedable. Then two offers a few weeks apart where neither proceeded at all, with poor communication. (practice at haggling?)

We’re currently proceeding well at last, and very happy with HN Conveyancing so far.

beccad

We were on the market for two weeks (give or take a couple of days) and had four viewers, the second of whom made an offer, and three and four said they wanted to, but we were under offer at that point. We took it off the market then.

However we're in London, and there's a bit of a shortage of properties at the moment, certainly not a lot of new stock at any rate.

Grolsch30

hi again,

well HN have just phoned informing me that an offer has been maid on our property.
we have our property on sale for £165k and the offer was for £155k well below what we expected.
we have declined the offer and said we are looking for at least £163k and left it there.

anybody have any advice on how to best negotiate? never sold a house before and in an ideal world would like the full £165k! but i fear the housing market will stagnate even further and thus hopefully will get the people wanting to buy our property to pay as much as poss!

Cheers now

mill10

Just thought i would add my experiences if useful.

HN were brilliant in setting up photos and getting us on rightmove and we recieved a lot of interest very quickly after the house went on sale. However, we got a lot of 'window shoppers' as i don't think the people booking the viewings are particularly good at/bothered about assessing people's situation - if you use them it's worth strongly specifying from the start what sort of people you're prepared to show to e.g. have mortgage offer in place, already sold theirs etc

We were made an offer quickly and conditionally (i.e. kept it on market) accepted full asking price because buyer hadn't sold their's yet. Our account manager promised us that he would ring them regularly to see how they were getting on but this didn't seem to happen at all for a number of weeks. we found we had to push for updates and as we had, stupidly, paid the whole fee upfront I expected a lot better service. I also had a bad experience with another account manager who stood in for a day - there were some things to sort out on the offer and I found her very rude and unhelpful.

6 weeks later a second much lower offer from a FTB came in and we accepted that. Again the account manager was very slow at keeping things moving and he didn't seem interested in ringing our buyers to see if they had got things moving with their solicitors etc. In the end the EA on the house WE then put an offer in on chased it up and found out that the buyers hadn't proceeded with anything and were pulling out.

We ended up remarketing with our vendor's EA and paying a 1% fee as well as the full fee we'd paid HN (£450 ish). The local EA had a number of potential buyers on his books and we got a really good offer. He then pushed everyone really hard to keep on top of things e.g. getting surveys done, contract docs returned to solicitors quickly and really earnt his fee.

In this market where buyers are nervous and prone to pulling out I would recommend using a locally recommended agent and accepting that, if you pay the much higher fee, it's because they managed to get the sale to go through and so earnt it.

HN seemed very uninterested in making our sale work once they'd been paid in full - silliest mistake I've ever made with money!