Why do we have estate agents?

eddddy

venomx wrote: »

Never understood why we have a middle man {estate agents} when we could deal with an communicate with the landlord directly?

I guess landlords use agents for the same reason that many people use...

• a garage to service their car
• a decorator to paint their house
• a plumber to do their plumbing
• the post office to deliver their letters
  etc

i.e. They don't have the time, knowledge, expertise, inclination etc to do it themselves.

oystercatcher

It seems much easier to walk into an agents office and say " I'm looking for somewhere to live, what is available?" Than to hunt around for various landlords. Vice versa much easier for a landlord to find tenants from a central office than loads of individual adverts.

Of course it's possible without an agent but not such a wide choice on either side.

AdrianC

oystercatcher wrote: »

It seems much easier to walk into an agents office and say " I'm looking for somewhere to live, what is available?" Than to hunt around for various landlords.

'course, these days with t'internet...

need_an_answer

I'm a LL and I use an agent simply because the whole thought of conducting viewings petrifies me rigid!

I'm happy for my agent to view,choose and present me with an option...after that point I'm the hands on LL who will happily deal with my tenants as needed.

The agent is there for tenant find then I take over


Its just my way.

MovingForwards

So they don't have to put up with tenants and get everything filtered via a LA.

G_M

I use an agent as they are so much better than me at winding my tenants up, promising to fix stuff that I don'tintend to pay to get fixed, and going into the property without warning for inspections and viewings (which I find far too embarrassing to do myself).


All well worth the % I pay the agent.

Finchy2018

When I was a property manager I was able to group small jobs such as leaky taps for various tennants into one job for a plumber. A job they won't go to on its own because financially not worth it. Gets fixed sooner so tt happy landlords get a smaller individual bill.

I kept up with all relevant legislation change (which can be often) digested and dealt with so landlord only need an update. It was under control.

When a LL was being a tit about repairs or deposit return I ensured everything was fair (I appreciate I was pro tenant rights which not all property managers are)

Slinky

We rented out the property we intend to move into shortly, for a while. We did it through an agent as we live over 100 miles away so dealing with anything which needing sorting was best done by somebody local.

Smodlet

Why do we have estate agents at all? Because our lives would be far too easy otherwise. We would have far too much disposable income to waste on gambling, the demon drink and loose living for lack of rip-off fees. The little people must be kept in their place, after all.

EAs also serve as a warning system; we might become too careless without them: We might be foolish enough to believe what property vendors tell us, whereas we know when an EA is lying because their lips are moving.

Who would write all those utterly accurate descriptions on RM and the like? We would not have such *gems of phrases as "bijou" for "can't take a deep breath without going outside" or "in need of modernisation" for "the only thing holding it up is the tree whose roots are visible in the utility room".

*See what I did there, AdrianC? Did you? Did you?