How can I get estate agent to proactively market us?

reformedEffortMaker_2

boots_babe-am I right in thinking that housenetwork are just an online company and do not have any shops?

re: decor of house, i think your house is very well presented, I honestly dont think there is much you could improve on here. What are your neighbours like?,....what is the drive/walk towards your house like?...it took 5 viewings of my property without an offer before someone was honest enough to tell me that they hated the junk outside my neighbours front door and that was what was putting them off!

Have you done any of the viewings yourself?.....I absolutely hated doing viewings as I felt this is where the EA should be earning their fee, however I ultimately sold to someone who I had shown round myself.
No one knows the house better than you, and if you show them round yourself, you know you are advertising the house the way it should be.

Also, have you tried viewing the properties of your immediate competition?.....the week I put my flat on the market, I viewed 3 properties in the same price bracket and within close proximity to my address to see what my flat would be compared to. I then cheekily reduced my flat by 5k to try and drum up more interest.

Let us know how you got on with confronting the manager about your mystery shopper!

stormCat99

Wow, only just looked at this thread again because I now have new problems with estate agents, and someone linked to this old thread of mine. So sorry for not replying, I've not had any autoemails to say it's been updated since I last posted. I'll try and reply to everyone.

JoJoArmani - thanks for the comments, so sorry to hear you are having problems too. It's been a while now, have you had any joy?

xela_17 - that is a v good point, and no we didn't. Although we now have more serious problems with the estate agent (see my newer thread) so this is down on the priority list at the moment. Thanks for pointing it out though as I never even though about it.

nick22abdn - thank you so much for all your suggestions. It made me smile reading your post as the vast majority of improvements you suggested, are all things I agree with. However as we were moving house, I thought we would live with the house as it was - we did do some repainting and fix various things before putting it on the market though - then I could put in a nice kitchen, bathrooms to my taste etc when we moved.

You are right though...maybe at this stage in the process it's time we thought about making some more changes. I've always hated the horrible antique pine (aka orange!) toilet seats, and actually this week 2 of them broke, so we have just got new neutral ones which look SO much better. We did consider new tiles in bathroom, partly because we don't like the existing ones, and partly because it is currently not tiled to the ceiling around the shower. We decided against it in the end though at the time.

Carpets in bathrooms - couldn't agree more! When I move I will definitely be having a nice tiled floor with lovely underfloor heating. This thought had actually come into my mind a couple of weeks ago actually - the floor space on all 3 bathrooms combined is only quite small, so prob wouldn't cost much to replace. It would look SO much better - think I'll look into this further.

Your comments regarding the kitchen - again, all very fair. And to be honest I've always hated the green worktops, but again didn't want to buy a whole new kitchen when I've suffered it this long, and am now moving house :-) The kitchen isn't actually as old as you think - the house was only build in 2002. I think this is one thing we won't be spending any more on before we move.

Rest of your comments I'm going to read in detail tonight, as there is some really useful stuff in there - thank you.

RHemmings - :rotfl:

xela_17 - well I did talk to EA about the mystery shopping call. The manager actually said that he remembered the call, and that he'd suggested our property to the girl who was on the phone. But that she had said that our property was in a different area, so was no good. Obviously she had no knowledge whatsoever of the areas as we are bang smack in the middle, and a fair way from the area she thought it was in! Didn't really get anywhere, he apologised and talked about retraining, but v shortly afterwards our EA was taken over by another EA - I've just started a new thread about our new difficulties with them :-(

dnwilliams - you're probably right to a point, we want to try and perservere if possible though - but we may have to give up.

Annabee - we love it too! Bought it from an eBay shop - I think they had a normal shop too. I'll try and look it up for you, I have a certificate of authenticity from them somewhere...I know it began with a V. I will PM you if I find it.

reformedEffortMaker - we've done all viewings ourselves. It is very daunting, especially at first. But at least I know that I've told them everything correctly, and everything that I want to tell them. It seems to have worked out well doing that so far.

We haven't actually viewed our competition, but we have looked them up on Rightmove which has been interesting - nothing major came out of it though.

Conrad

Imagine you had an agency. You take an OVERPIRICED property on against your wishes.

Will you put lots of effort into this property? No of course you wont because it has a slim chance of selling so to divert resources to such a cause makes no business sense.

SCENARIO B

You take on a red hot property - it's no better than property A but the price is attractive. You can smell the commision.
Will you put resources and time into this one? Of course you will.

EA's are often a bit lazy I agree, but they are also very money shrewd as a breed.

An old adage Ive heard some use is this;

Dont do it unless your going to get paid.

Those of you who expect to pay a 1% fee and market on a muti agency basis are known as TIME VAMPIRES in the industry - would you waste reseources on someone not comitted to selling via you?

As for the OP, you are over priced, end of.. Nothing more to be discussed.

Phirefly

excellent tips, nick22abdn, thanks

kodokan

Conrad wrote: »

Imagine you had an agency. You take an OVERPIRICED property on against your wishes.

Will you put lots of effort into this property? No of course you wont because it has a slim chance of selling so to divert resources to such a cause makes no business sense.

SCENARIO B

You take on a red hot property - it's no better than property A but the price is attractive. You can smell the commision.
Will you put resources and time into this one? Of course you will.

Conrad's absolutely right. When we sold a house a couple of years ago (during the last market slowdown, remember when it stalled towards the end of 2005, before the misguided base rate cut..?), we marketed with no interest for a month at £290k - having been advised to price high to escape the SD threshold - then chopped the price to £250k; there really is no point doing the mid-ground.

Well, the morning I did that, I was taking phone calls for viewing appts every 20 mins from a different sales person in the EA. EVERY agent in the office was actively selling MY house and no other, because they could almost taste the money. Darned effective, too, I had about 10 viewings over the next few days and two asking price offers within a week, and chose the buyers with no chain. They didn't try and offer below the £250k, BTW, as it was obvious that it had been priced to SELL at that level, not to start negotiations at that point.

There were other comparable houses to mine for the same agent, for prices around £270-£285k - bet their houses didn't get a single phone call made about them that day. Or ever, in fact - they were just wallpaper for the EA office, until the owners got fed up keeping the place tidy and took it off the market 'to wait for the upturn'. Well, last time I checked, the SW hasn't had an upturn of in excess of 25% since then, so they're still in the Stamp Duty threshold band.

And for anyone who took a sharp intake of breath at a price cut of that magnitude, I fully expect to get a good deal on buying next time (renting at the mo), as there are almost no chain-free buyers in the 4-bed detached bracket. And hey, touch wood I've got a lot of life left! This is hardly going to be the only opportunity to make money for the next 50 years!

Cut the price and sell, or take it off the market and stop wasting everyone's time. Can't wait until HIPS clears the dead wood, and we can see the real sellers amongst all those trees.

kodokan

Conrad

kodokan wrote: »

Conrad's absolutely right.

Cut the price and sell, or take it off the market and stop wasting everyone's time. Can't wait until HIPS clears the dead wood, and we can see the real sellers amongst all those trees.

kodokan

Well said.

Far to many posters on these forums seem to want to pour love over one another which comes accross as pretty false and manipuative.

I like the Simon Cowell School of thought - tell em how it is, in the end that's the only honest and meaningful way to help people.

As if EAs want to go to all the bother of putting homes on thier books only to have them sitting there!

All the 'I cant sell my home' threads come down to one thing only; PRICE

Debt_Free_Chick

Conrad wrote: »

Imagine you had an agency. You take an OVERPIRICED property on against your wishes.

Will you put lots of effort into this property? No of course you wont because it has a slim chance of selling so to divert resources to such a cause makes no business sense.

I fully agree, but we've yet to establish whether the contractual obligations have been fulfilled.

If they haven't - then the new EA must fulfil them, whatever they would prefer. When the EA bought the business, they bought all the existing contractual rights.

Of course, we don't yet know whether they are contractually bound to do anything .... probably plenty of small print to wriggle out of