Rise of On-line

October 9, 2016 by Rob Kahl

Rise of on-line

This year has seen a marked rise in the presence of on-line estate agents. These guys offer a service quite different from the more traditional high street agent and are attractive to a lot of people because of a proposed much cheaper fee. But beware! The cheaper headline fee might not be the deal it's cracked up to be!

Most of the on-line agents offer different levels of service for differing fees. This will range from the very basic where it is up to you take your own photos of your property, send it to them and they just put the property on-line, to the more comprehensive where they actually send someone round to the house to carry out a valuation.

A lot of the agents will charge an up front fee and then a further fixed rate fee on completion. With most of the more traditional high street agents we all work on a no sale, no fee basis where we don’t get a bean unless we sell your property and there are no up front charges.

Being on-line the method these agents choose is to market their properties through the internet. This is a massive weapon in all of our arsenals to be able to attract potential purchasers to our properties and all high street agents also have a large on-line presence. There is no denying that this is a fantastic way for people to see properties instantly and easy at any time of day and it makes up a great deal of our business.

The on-line agents however have all of their eggs in this one basket. Leigh on Sea is such a desirable place to live that a good deal of our business comes from people visiting the area for the first time, enjoying the café culture, shops and seafront. These guys just happen to pop into our offices after passing and seeing a property in the window or for a chat to ask about the general property market. We put a suitable property under their noses and low and behold they go ahead and buy it! Without a prominent Broadway position and large window display these potential buyers who might not have been thinking about moving at that exact point may not have ever seen that property?

We also advertise in the local press which most of the on-line agents do not. This gives us a much wider spectrum and again puts us in front of a potential purchaser or seller who may not have been thinking there and then that they were going to move, but something grabs their attention and spurs them in to action.

The last part of the argument is much more difficult to put across. I don’t know of any of the high street agents in Leigh on Sea that haven’t had at least 1 or 2 members of their staff that haven’t been in or around the Leigh housing market for at least 10 years. (unfortunately it is a lot more for me, I know what you're thinking.....I don’t look old enough?). This experience on the front line of a fast moving and popular housing market is in invaluable and worth its weight in gold. I can say from personal experience that there are not now many properties in Leigh that I haven’t visited or sold and many that I am now selling for second, third or even fourth time.

This continuity and history will serve the client well knowing where to pitch prices and dealing with offers. You may think that saving £1,000 on a fee is worth it initially but if you undersell your property by £5,000, £10,000 or even more then it pales into insignificance.

There is also the service in general and especially the after sales service that differs greatly from on-line & high street agents. As estate agents our main remit is to introduce buyers to new houses. Theoretically once this is done our job is complete but realistically this is only a small part of what we do as traditional estate agents.

Chasing sales through to their conclusion rather than leaving buyers & sellers to their own devices is a massive part of what we do. Unfortunately, once a sale has been agreed it is taking an average of around 10 weeks before the exchange of contracts will take place. We are available at all stages of this process and chase every step of the way.

To give an example of the amount of work this entails, if a vendor calls me chasing every day, 6 days a week for 10 weeks that is 600 phone calls I will take or make. I will also have to do the same amount for the purchaser, solicitors, surveyors, mortgage brokers and any other estate agents and everybody else involved in the chain. If you had to do this yourself or were left in the dark about where you were in the process then I am sure you would be pulling your hair out (I do most days!).

So when you are considering selling your home, by all means compare us, as the more traditional high street estate agents to the on-line agents but compare us on service, marketing and expertise not just the headline fee.

This article is by Rob @ Scott & Stapleton. To read all Rob's previous blogs please click the link https://www.leigh-on-sea.com/blog/tag/property.html
Tel: 01702 471155