Estate Agent or Purple Bricks

Hannimal

I bought a property marketed through PB. The seller had this property listed for quite some time and they lowered the asking by at least 15k in the time, and had one buyer pull out. Not sure if that is related to PB. Properties in the area that stay on the market for a long time are overwhelmingly being sold by either PB or Yopa (which is same sh*t, different a**hole as the saying goes)

Both my mortgage advisor and my conveyancing said they had poor experience with PB from before. Mortgage advisor actually phoned me up after I had my offer accepted and asked them to step in to help, and said the "property looks great but my heart sunk when I saw it was through PB". The sellers used the PB solicitors and they were slow and inefficient, kept sending documents with pages missing, took a while to reply to queries and so on. They came across very inefficient. I don't know if it is usual for solicitors but having seen their e-mails to my solicitor, they were even a bit rude. Not sure that matters, it was just odd for me to see. 

I personally would not be using PB.

Skiddaw1

I've mentioned it on a previous thread, but we once (and only once) viewed a PB house and it was a terrible experience. We booked a viewing on-line, which was then cancelled and rearranged three times and when we did finally get to view the PB EA was late, had obviously just got out of bed and spent the entire viewing on his mobile (taking what was clearly a personal call). Never again....

Angela_D_3

I like purple bricks,  youre able to place offers directly with the seller and explain your  reasoning and position clearly 

Mathes00n

PB are a waste of space unless you know you will have ten viewings in the first weekend. Go with your local EA if you know you are going to have to be more patient. We went with PB because their person impressed us the most. However she then delegated us to someone else within a few weeks. They are all stretched too thinly, covering areas they cannot cope with. Our new PB tried to convince us that it was normal for people who want to view to have to wait three weeks for them to be available to show them round (they try to convince you to pay for them to do viewings and then are not available to do the viewings).
It's not all roses with EA of course but they are local, more available and do same day viewings. As I say, I consider PB are misspelling their services in areas where there isn't a very high demand for houses. £1,200 down the drain.
Oh and the online services and app become very old when you see 100,000 have done a Rightmove search in your area and you've only had 1 viewing! It's a gimmick.

hollie.weimeraner

We've gone with a local EA.  PB overvalued it as well in my opinion. We got 4 valuations and will be marketing it in the middle

tommyedinburgh

I would personally avoid Purple Bricks at all costs. 

A couple of of months ago I tried to get a Home Report from them, after asking several times (email/telephone) I ended up going to the property and putting a note through the door asking if they could email a copy. 

The same day I received a call from the fairly irate Purple Bricks local guy, the call ended with him saying he’d come off the phone and send it. Two days later I hadn’t received it so again tried phoning Purple Bricks. No success, so back to put a note through the door to again ask. I then received a call from an extremely irate Purple Bricks local guy who admitted he’d forgotten to send it. To be fair at this point he did send the home report on but by then my wife had lost confidence In them so we didn’t take it any further.