Communication, communication, communication

Charitymanager

Hi All,

In honesty there is little point to this post other than a bit of a rant.

We are in the process of selling our current home and buying another. It has been anything but simple, but thankfully we have been in touch throughout directly with both vendors and purchasers. What really frustrates me is that without that directness of communication, this would have fallen apart by now!

Why on earth am I paying an EA 2K an a solicitor 1.5k when they all seem incapable of communicating in any sort of useful way. Our purchaser's solicitor seems to think he is waiting for a trial at the Old Bailey and communicates with pompous legal posturing and it is driving me nuts.

Why don't peope involved in house buying and selling realise that this isnt about getting one over on another solicitor, but rather is about people's lives, money etc.

Rant over!:mad:

kingstreet

As my former boss used to say, the contract with an estate agent is to find "a ready, willing and able purchaser who can proceed quickly to unconditional exchange of contracts."

That is what you pay for.

If an agent chooses to chase the sale after it is agreed and passed to solicitors, it does so to try to speed up the payment of its fee and for no other reason.

He was the owner of a twelve branch estate agency chain.

Charitymanager

kingstreet wrote: »

As my former boss used to say, the contract with an estate agent is to find "a ready, willing and able purchaser who can proceed quickly to unconditional exchange of contracts."

That is what you pay for.

If an agent chooses to chase the sale after it is agreed and passed to solicitors, it does so to try to speed up the payment of its fee and for no other reason.

He was the owner of a twelve branch estate agency chain.

In which case even based on the above....they still dont in the main do a very good job

AlexMac

Bad luck; but we all need to rant occasionally; thankfully, our solicitor was quite the opposite; replied instantly to phone or emailed contacts (including the 1st contact to seek a quote- one of the reasons for our choice), used email to carve days off our and the other sides' responses to standard enquiries or searches, spoke plain English and really looked after our interests.... Unsurprisingly (perhaps) ours is a woman solicitor...

Although I do recall my 1st purchase, many years ago, when the (unsurprisingly?) male solicitor waited til the afternoon of completion to mention that my lender's cheque hadn't arrived (in those pre-BACS days) and that the purchase was thus deferred! I guess some of them might still think they have to pile on the stress, complications and pomposity to persuade us that they are indispensible.
Alex (aka CharityFundraiser)

kingstreet

Charitymanager wrote: »

In which case even based on the above....they still dont in the main do a very good job

Yeah, but if you pitch your expectation too high...

In the current climate for most of the country, them finding a buyer who is able to proceed would be a positive outcome.

Stormchaser_2

Have to agree with the OP. When we were buying (and we have bought 3 properties in the past: ) on each occasion, the estate agent did SOD-ALL for their money, except put the sign board up, take a few pics of inside our house, and stick it in the local newspaper twice a month, and stick it in their shop with 1000 other properties.

When we were trying to sell our last house, nobody came around for the first 2 months, so we asked them if there had been any interest at all, and if they were pushing it... Suddenly someone came around, who had not one iota of interest in our house. IMO, they were fake clients. (This happened a few times actually...)

We also had a private landlord come around who also showed no interest, and then told the estate agent that he 'didn't like the position of the house.' Rubbish, He had 2 others in our road and knew exactly where the house was. All the estate agent did for us was send a few red herrings, and they barely earned a tenth of what we had to pay them. In the end, it was sold to a colleague of my neighbours, who told them about it! So they didn't even find a buyer - our neighbour did!!!

I was rather loathed to pay them at the end. WE chased the buyers of our house and the people who WE were buying from, and they chased us, (in fact, we all chased our own estate agents.) And the solicitors were almost as noggin-headed! We called time after time to see what was what, and kept getting told 'so and so is not in right now...' and all that crap. We should have paid the solicitors fee AND the estate agents fee to ourselves, as we did far more than they did.

kingstreet

Charitymanager and CharityFundraiser?

Do you two follow each other around?

Charitymanager

kingstreet wrote: »

Yeah, but if you pitch your expectation too high...

In the current climate for most of the country, them finding a buyer who is able to proceed would be a positive outcome.

I wonder what the disabled children my charity works for would say if I told them they were setting their expectations too high?

They are a service sector industry and consequently I expect high quality service. That isn't high expectations that is reasonable. I don't think I am asking the world either

Charitymanager

kingstreet wrote: »

Charitymanager and CharityFundraiser?

Do you two follow each other around?

LOL first time we have met honestly. :beer:

kingstreet

Charitymanager wrote: »

I wonder what the disabled children my charity works for would say if I told them they were setting their expectations too high?

They are a service sector industry and consequently I expect high quality service. That isn't high expectations that is reasonable. I don't think I am asking the world either

That was a tongue in cheek comment, which doesn't really work on the internet, TBH. I was trying to suggest that expectation of estate agents in general couldn't get much lower.

There's a great deal of confusion about what estate agents actually do and what they are remunerated for. If you know their only remunerated role is the "ready, willing and able purchaser bit" and they do that with reasonable efficiency, you could argue they've reached the agreed level of service.

Vendors wanting and expecting them to hand-hold and chase up the other parties in the chain and view that as part of the service for which they pay are likely to feel their expectations haven't been met.

As a Midlands-based advisor and former employee of three estate agents, I can say my former employers all offered excellent service to vendor and purchaser alike and would help any party in the process if able to do so. They were all small to medium-sized firms, owned and run by chartered surveyors who did not have the kind of corporate pressure to flog other "earners" for the firm you see today in the nationals.

propertyman

I have to support Kingstreet in that EA practice varies from the "throw enough mud at a wall and hope some of it sticks" to those that have a low turnover but a very high sales rate. Many are in the middle and have dedicated people to progress sales.

What most don't understand is that the solicitor does very little actual work beyond the contract and enquiries and their role is actually
a; checking documents and searches
b: waiting for lenders surveyors people and local authorities to all do their thing.

All those people work to their own timescales and ideas, not ours. The EA that prospers are most often those that help move that along, explain delays and hold the hands of anxious vendors and buyers, and sometimes get someone to be exceptional.

Sound familiar ?

In my case I am still an investor/equity partner in a GP firm that I started out in and to this day the sales rate- homes listed and then sold - is never less than the mid to high 90% range.

I never forgot the day I had a Y shaped chain ( divorce) with 20 moves in all, on a house that everybody had on for a silly price. The senior partner thought I was crazy but the client was desperate and understood the risks. It completed.


What I learnt then that it was not simply communication, any idiot can chase, but that information and reassurance won the day, and we all made a lot of friends across the S East.