Best flat fee

Savedotmoney

Hey,

We have decided we are selling our house now.

We have been quoted £900 for solicitor fees to facilitate sale of house.

I'm looking at the best flat rate estate agent online. Anyone used Purple Bricks before? They charge £849. I don't want to pay 0.8% of the sale of a £340k house thank you very much.

Has anyone used easyProperty.com?

Anyone recommend any of these online agents?

Oh and we live in East London.

Thanks,
Carl

googler

A forum search for 'online agents' will get loads of discussion threads already on this topic.

Lemonsqueezer78

Savedotmoney wrote: »

Anyone used Purple Bricks before? They charge £849.

Oh and we live in East London.

Then its £1,199 for PB.

They are OK if you have a nice, easily saleable, property (in good nick, no oddities, in a decent and reasonably desirable area) and it is correctly priced.

If there is anything about your property - or the area - that might require a bit of extra "work" to get people to come and check it out, then think twice about using an online EA.

ladymarmalade222

I have dealt with easy property recently to try and get a viewing on a house we loved.

Got through to a call centre who were more interested in harvesting a huge amount of my data. They wanted to know so much info just to try and arrange a viewing which I found uncomfortable. Much more than the local agents asked. I got a different answer everytime I called.

They never got back to me after promising callbacks 4 times and I now I understand why the house has been on the market for 12 months. We were in a good position and loved the house but never got a viewing. I gave up

Hope this helps

Xx

Savedotmoney

Thanks for the heads up. I think the fact that they have burnt their bridge with rubbish flights has put me off of easy... anything.

Sorry about double post, I'm on my iPad.

Savedotmoney

Lemonsqueezer78 wrote: »

Then its £1,199 for PB.

They are OK if you have a nice, easily saleable, property (in good nick, no oddities, in a decent and reasonably desirable area) and it is correctly priced.

If there is anything about your property - or the area - that might require a bit of extra "work" to get people to come and check it out, then think twice about using an online EA.

Would you say pre cast concrete drops in to that oddities category? Although it doesn't affect price, a potential buyer may want to know more about it's build type.

Lemonsqueezer78

I don't know enough about that construction type - but is it obvious from the property details/pictures? Would you say (honestly) that the fact that it is pre-cast concrete is something that could put a percentage of people off from viewing it? Are you aware of some lenders not allowing it for the purpose of a mortgage? You say it doesn't affect price, but is that just your opinion or is it backed up by fact - i.e. comparable property sales in the area for the price you want to ask....

If this is likely to mean that getting people to actually come and view your property might require a bit of extra pro-active effort/persuasion on the part of an EA...OR, if it is likely to cause delays or hiccups during the conveyancing processs, then I would think twice about going with an online EA. There are a lot of !!!! high street EAs around - but if you get a good one, they can be highly effective at both getting people to actually come and view "tricky" properties, and smoothing over bumps in the road that can occur after a sale is agreed. Online EAs are often not very good at doing either of these things, in my opinion.

Phirefly

I posted this on a recent thread. Hope you find it useful...

We used Yopa. I chose them based on the fact that of all the online options, only Yopa and Purple Bricks are true hybrid agents meaning they use a sole local permanent experienced estate agent to handle your sale as opposed to a team of remote property managers. For me it was the perfect combination of the benefits of traditional agent vs. sole online concept. I chose them over Purple Bricks as they have an in-house call centre which means a more focussed, efficient and knowledgeable service.

We paid for the accompanied viewing upgrade so it was less that £1000 all in, paid up front but with a market-until-sold guarantee with no time limit. This was important to us as ours is a real summertime house so if it hadn't sold by the end of September we planned to relist in spring.

Our local agent was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and committed. He answered my calls immediately or returned them within a very short time. He also answered texts day and night. They offer accompanied viewings up to 10pm 7 days a week which was another big selling point for me.

We had two offers resultant from the first two viewings and were SSTC on day three of our house being listed. The conveyancing has been somewhat problematic (completely unrelated to Yopa) but our local agent has been constantly available to assist and he and the sales progression team have been helpful and proactive in pushing things through.

I also chose Yopa as they have been backed by Savills which is a big vote of confidence IMO. I like their marketing, their website and their business model. It all makes sense. I cannot recommend them enough and truly believe that this is the future of estate agency. Its a no-brainer.

I would like to clarify that I have no affiliation or reason for recommending them other than based on my personal experience using them to sell our house.