Irritated with EA - Should we be ?

Riggster

Get as many viewers as you can through the door.

It can be a pain in the !!!!, but so is everything to do with buying and selling a house.

The more viewers you have, the more chance you have of selling. Anything can happen, but if you haven't the viewers, you won't sell!

lessonlearned

Dan-Dan wrote: »

Evening all

Is this unreasonable ?

Also , we have a 12 week contract , we know what we would take , and we are comfortable doing viewings , its only now after the EA is shoving anyone through our door that we feel we might as well use house network or similar and do it ourselves........any thoughts on that ?

Gettong stressed now , just want to get sold and get on in life

Cheers

No you are not being unreasonable. However as I hope I've just illustrated it is not wise to limit your potential market by placing stringent restrictions on who you will allow to view.

Re going it alone through house network or similar.

I have not used that route so cannot comment. I think it would depend on a number of variables. How active your local market is, the time of year, what kind of property, is their any "passing trade" and so forth.

You are comfortable doing viewings so no problem there. However, you might find it even harder to weed out non proceedable viewers and you really would have to be open to all comers.

Would you be happy "progressing the sale" to ensure things stay on track.

A lot of people don't realise that progress chasing is an essential part of the EA's job. However, it is largely a "back-room" task so it's not always apparent just how much time and effort this actually takes.

This may be a relatively simple task if your buyer is not in a chain, however, if there is a chain involved it can get quite complicated and you will need the co-operation of EA's and solicitors in the chain.

It is highly unlikely that your purchaser's solicitor will even give you the time of day let alone discuss their client's business with you. They can't.

This is where a good EA really earns their money, talking to each other on behalf of their clients, each liaising with their client's solicitor, lender, broker, surveyor etc to keep things ticking along nicely.

As you know I'm an ex EA myself.

I always used to teach my trainees that marketing a house and getting the offers in was the easy bit. Keeping the sale was the hard part, that's when the work really began in earnest.

Always bear in mind there is a high failure rate. 1 in 3 sales fail to complete. Keeping sales on track is not as easy as you might think.

Another point to consider is timing.

When does your contract end. Remember we are drawing close to the end of the normal "Spring Surge" - about another month at most.

July and August are traditionally quiet months. You might be best to stick with it until September before you relaunch, either with a different EA or going it alone.

If you do decide to relaunch - you might be better to "rest" it for a while.

My sister took my advice on this. Her house was on the market from last Sept - nothing doing. She took it off the market in February. Rested it for 2 months, relaunched with a different agent, nice new photos. It's now sold subject to contract - took just 3 weeks.