ESTATE AGENCY COMPARISON SITES -

ESTATE AGENCY COMPARISON SITES -

ESTATE AGENCY COMPARISON SITES -

Will I save money by going through a comparison site?

More and more of these sites are popping up, claiming to provide insight in to the performance levels of estate agents and with the promise of saving money, the reality can be very different.

Having researched these sites, we consistently feature in the top 3 as judged by their criteria (average time to sell, price achieved and volume) but have purposefully refused to receive enquiries for a number of reasons:

Firstly, their claims to save money – These sites typically charge agents 0.25% for the privilege of receiving an e-mail that leads to an instruction. Agents either have to swallow this referral fee (as we previously did) or in many cases, add this to their commission. This often results in sellers actually paying more by going through these sites, rather than saving money.

Secondly – When challenged how their stats are effected by properties coming back to the market after a sale has fallen through or by the actions of some agents who purposefully re-list properties after they have completed, they are unable to provide a satisfactory response. We have challenged them on several occasions without a clear answer.

So when researching which agents to work with, you will be far better served by contacting the agents directly and enquiring about fees yourself. Ask the agents to demonstrate how active they are in selling properties of your type and in your locality.