Blue Skies, Nothing But Blue Skies…

They say that a picture speaks a thousand words and whether that is accurate or not, a good picture does stick in the mind. So when it comes to selling your house, you need to make sure that the pictures of your home are speaking those right words to potential buyers.

The world of internet property portals (i.e. Rightmove and Zoopla) has changed the nature of estate agency. It is now very easy to market a property to large numbers of people in a way that was unthinkable 20 years ago. But this has also changed the way in which a property needs to be marketed, as your home is now competing for attention along with lots of other properties in the local area, so every little thing counts.

In the light of this, we at SaleBoards are constantly amazed at the poor quality of photographs that some agents think are acceptable for marketing a property. We have found that, in our experience, a nice sunny day and a lovely blue sky behind a property really makes a difference, grabbing the attention of the people looking on the internet and making it stand out from the crowd. It’s not rocket science we’ll readily admit but a little bit of attention to detail goes a long way to make sure your property stands out from the crowd. Take a look at the examples below and you’ll see what we mean!

Before:

After:

When Complacency Takes Hold

One of the things that consistently amaze us here at SaleBoards is why people let agents make a mess of advertising their properties. The property websites are full of listings with blurred or poor-quality photos as well as misspelt or bizarre descriptions of houses. Now we’re not trying to say that we get everything right all the time, but these are schoolboy errors that are easily avoidable and simply show an agent that is taking absolutely no care over their work.

So when you are invited to sell a £3m country home just outside Exeter, you would think a simple read-through of the advert might be a good idea.  In this example, there are typographical errors all through the key features, which are also not exactly expansive in their details, given the size and nature of the property.   As this is the first thing people will read, it’s an immediate turn off for any prospective buyers and makes the agent look amateurish. 

Think about it more carefully; this type of error does more than damages a well-respected national agent’s reputation. If this were my house, I’d be the first off the mark to get down to the agent’s office with a letter cancelling my instruction.  Assuming estate agency rates of around 1.75%, the agent involved might be waving goodbye to a fee of more than £50,000!

If you’re looking to market your property with an agent, do look at some of the properties they have marketed; both what they look like on the internet or on their particulars. We at SaleBoards cannot promise to get it right 100% of the time, but we do take real pride in how we market our properties; doing everything we can to make sure that your property looks good on the internet and in printed media, as well as employing a professional proof-reader to make sure that mistakes like you see above don’t happen.

89% say they would not trust an estate agent in Which Magazine Survey

At last – Estate agents are deemed more trustworthy than politicians or bankers – but only just!

In 2004 Which Magazine compiled a survey of the least trusted professions.  Topping the list was the good old Tabloid Journalist, but in second place was the Estate Agent.  Seven years on, the survey has been repeated and, would you believe it, second and third are now taken by Bankers and Politicians.  Estate agents have gone from 2^nd to 4^th place in the latest survey.

Have there been any changes in the last 7 years that could have lead to this slight improvement in trustworthiness?  Well, in theory, yes there have.  Since the last survey was taken, compulsory membership of the Property Ombudsman Scheme has been introduced and tenants have greater protection with the new deposit protection scheme. 

In practise, however, it probably hasn’t made a blind bit of difference to the average estate agent.  Whilst the Ombudsman is supposed to protect the consumer, the annual report, aside from giving some very entertaining stories about what can go wrong for an estate agent, details numerous case studies where the agent has been found guilty of deception or incompetence.  In almost all of these examples, the agent has been forced to pay the most derisory compensation payments imaginable (I’ve written a separate article on this previously!(https://saleboards.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/the-property-ombudsman-a-help-or-hindrance/)).  In the last 7 years, the country has seen a banking crisis and numerous examples of bankers behaving badly or stupidly with our hard earned money; Politicians have fared little better with their own expenses scandal.  Don’t forget,  the number of housing transactions is running at an all-time low, meaning a much higher proportion of the population may not have used an estate agent than in the boom times of 7 years ago.  With only 11% of those surveyed saying they would trust an estate agent, and having only moved up the rankings because other professions are now perceived as being even worse, this is no cause for celebration within the industry.

Yet a quick skim of the customer reviews from our own agency paints a very different picture.  Founded on ethical values, customers who have bought or sold through the agency often comment on how they felt they could trust the staff and directors to be completely honest in this somewhat tarnished profession.

So if you’re looking for someone to trust to look after the sale of what is probably your most valuable asset, check out the growing website www.allagents.co.uk , where customers are invited to review their experiences of estate agents.  Furthermore, if an agent is making claims such as “We’ve definitely got buyers for your house” (which there is no way they can promise if the buyers haven’t already seen it) or they are prepared to value at a figure which is significantly higher than what you’d expect, then this is probably the first indication that you should stick with the 89% who don’t trust estate agents!

The Property Ombudsman: A Help or Hindrance?

Why complaining about your Estate Agent might not be as straightforward as you might expect.

 

As one walks around and browses the windows of their local estate agents, they may feel confident with the observation of decals supporting the logo of the Office of Fair Trade.  With membership to The Property Ombudsman, one would assume the public are fairly well protected when something doesn’t go to plan.  It is not unreasonable to expect that in the event that they need to complain, all they have to do is pick up the phone and register their grievance with the all important ‘overseer’ of estate agents.

Taking Advantage of the Vulnerable.

Having been asked recently to advise an elderly lady who fell foul of an unscrupulous local estate agent (sorry, I’m not going to mention names!), I find myself firmly in the position of the consumer.  In this instance, she has not only received a poor level of service, but she has been put on a long sole agency agreement at an excessively high fee, charged almost twice the going rate for her energy assessment, charged for legal work which she didn’t want and charged extra for photographs.   She only chose the agent because they gave her the highest valuation – sadly far too high, so the whole relationship was kicked off with a lie.

Whilst I am no lawyer and made that clear to vendor, I was able to tell her about the Estate Agency Act (1979) and some of the rules that appeared to have been broken.  In particular, the fees charged for photography did not appear on the written agreement and the agent didn’t provide evidence of the valuation (The Estate Agency act has recently been modified so that agents have an obligation to record how they arrived at a valuation.  Clearly, over-valuing is becoming a well known problem!).

And when you need to complain.

So a quick call to the Ombudsman should sort things out nicely.  Sadly this is not the way the Ombudsman works.  Before you can complain to the Ombudsman, you must go through the individual company’s complaints procedure.  Simple?  No way! (Actually, one could be forgiven for thinking that some agents make it as difficult as possible for customers to make a complaint.)

Take a look at a typical complaints procedure from a well known national estate agency.  Please note that this is an example of a complaints procedure and it was not the agency involved in the case I mention above.  http://www.haart.co.uk/contact-us/compliants/ . 

Thumbs up to Haart for publishing their complaints procedure on-line, but take note that before the Ombudsman will get involved, you have to make a complaint in writing to the branch manager.  If he doesn’t deal with it to your satisfaction, you then have to write to the regional manager, and if you still haven’t got the answer you are looking for, then you have to write to the customer relations department.  Only then will the ombudsman get involved if they have not sorted it out.  So the agency get 3 opportunities to sort this out before they can be rebuked in any form at all.  This is going to take weeks or months and hours of the consumer’s time!  So how many complainants would fizzle out before getting their case heard by the Ombudsman?

The Ombudsman – a help or hinderance?

To comply with current legislation, estate agents are practically forced to be members of the scheme with a membership fee of £170 + VAT for a single branch.  With the knowledge that there are some 13,000 member branches registered for Sales activities, that equates to over £2M for which they dealt with 587 complaints in 2011.  Plugging this into my calculator, I work out that each complaint costs £3400 on average to investigate.  Is this good value, especially given that 294 of the 324 awards made were less than £500?

And when one looks at the 2011 Annual Report from The Property Ombudsman, the satisfaction level from consumers is fairly shocking.  In their own satisfaction survey, only 25% of complainants were satisfied with the level of the award made and 32% of complainants were satisfied with the decision made by the Ombudsman.  In my mind, this doesn’t paint a particularly good picture of the industry on the whole.  The annual report makes quite interesting reading. 

http://www.tpos.co.uk/downloads/reports/TPO%20Annual%20Report%202011.pdf

If you do get a chance to have a look at this document, take a look at the level of compensation paid.  The thought of being reprimanded by their Ombudsman should send a shiver down the spine of any business owner.  Take a read of some of the cases involved.  On page 30, an example is given where an agent has clearly done a pretty poor job.  The problems included failure to arrange viewings correctly, even with the knowledge that a large dog was resident and would be in significant danger if it got onto the busy road.  When the surveyor had to take cover from the owners’ Dog because the agents have slipped up again, the implications on the progression of the sale could have been huge.  (Our advice to vendors is to feed surveyors on chocolate biscuits, not feed them to your dog!  They have the power to make your sale fall through or be renegotiated by thousands of pounds.)

On top of the dog incident, the agents had clearly messed up on at least one viewing which had not been booked, could not find any evidence of sending out a memorandum of sale and had not followed up the transaction after the sale was agreed.  The Ombudsman awarded the vendors £350 compensation.  It doesn’t say in the report how much the agents had charged the client, but it is usual for estate agency fees to be in the region of several thousand pounds.

I know that if my own agency had let down a client in this way (and I really hope we never get close!), I would not feel it appropriate to make any charge at all.  The whole reason for instructing an estate agent is to make sure that you maximise on the price you achieve for your home and that any sale goes through smoothly, which in this instance was not likely to be the case.

I frequently hear of fairly significant complaints against agents locally.  Some are justified, some are unfair and others are quite serious.  I’ve heard of instances where offers have not been put forward to the vendors and many others like my first example, where vulnerable clients have been taken advantage of.  The problem in my mind is that the Ombudsman can only become involved in complaints after a serious amount of effort from the consumer.  Even after the agency has been found ‘guilty’ by the Ombudsman, the penalty is usually fairly insignificant and the repercussions are fairly small whilst the general public will almost certainly never find out.

Name and Shame

When an agent under-performs or breaks the rules, should they not be severely reprimanded?  Having survived 5 years without a single request to view the complaint procedure, my feeling is that any complaint that makes it as far as the ombudsman is likely to reflect poorly on an agency.  If the complaint is upheld, then surely consumers have a right to know.  Surely this makes for a fairly strong case for publication of the outcomes of such cases.

Perhaps to explain why the Ombudsman doesn’t come down particularly hard on its members, the whole set-up needs to be considered.  Since both the Chief Executive and the Chairman of the Ombudsman used to be estate agents themselves and the simple fact the ombudsman is funded by its estate agents and run by estate agents, is going to mean that they are never going to be too harsh on their membership.  Simply put, if they upset their members, then they are probably going lose members to rival organisations such as the RICS Ombudsman Scheme. 

In the meantime, we’ll continue to display our Office of Fair Trade sticker in the window, in the knowledge that if anyone ever has a case against us, we can rest assured in the knowledge that it probably won’t break the bank or even damage our unblemished reputation!

Is Housing at its most affordable level in 10 years?

There’s all sorts of conflicting information sloshing round the internet at the moment about the various strengths and weaknesses of the housing market, with different commentators prophesying either a sooner recovery than expected or imminent doom depending on which headline their aiming for. However, the piece of news that has caught my eye in recent days was the report from the Halifax, claiming that housing is at its most affordable level in 10 years. Given the current economic climate and the pessimism about mortgage lending, this prompted me to do some digging to see if our experiences on the front line backed this up.

 

Once you dig into the reports that the Halifax have been putting out, it does seem that the BBC (who brought the story to my attention (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18839255)) were guilty of a little bit of headline seeking – Housing is only really at its most affordable in Scotland. However it’s Halifax’s methodology, and overall subsequent findings, that seem most worth of attention. They worked on the premise that buyers would be looking to borrow up to four times their income and so multiplied the average earnings of a Local Authority area by the average house price in the same area. This showed that, of the areas surveyed, “54% were deemed to be affordable” which “was the highest figure since 2002.” So this all sounds very lovely but even more interesting was the news from the Halifax that “Mortgage payments for a new borrower remain significantly below the long-term average as a proportion of disposable earnings.” (http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media1/press_releases/2012_press_release_brands/halifax/0507_HPI.asp) Not only do houses seem to be more affordable but the proportional cost of paying for a mortgage seems to have dropped as well in real terms. When combined by news of rising rents (http://www.propertydrum.com/articles/20120415_4), it looks like we could be set for a return to a buoyant housing market.

 

But is this borne out in the open market? While we saw a rise in viewings and sales in March and April (probably attributable to the change in stamp duty), things have stayed fairly uninspiring. The total number of viewings we’ve conducted have stayed constant over the last few months and, while the percentage of viewings that lead to sales has increased, this isn’t very helpful as the number of viewings is down on what it should be at this time of year. So while Halifax’s news is probably good news, we’re not seeing the effects on the market yet.

The Estate Agent’s Dictionary

Like every area of life, estate agency has evolved its own particular specialist vocabulary and not just that “deceptively spacious” generally means small! There’s usually quite a lot of confusion about some of the terms so we thought we’d post a few explanations here to try and clear things up. Many of these are fairly self-explanatory but sometimes have a bit of nuance to them.

1. Cash Buyer: You are a cash buyer if you have all the money you need sitting in the bank waiting to be spent. However, if you’re buying with a mortgage and a cash deposit, but not selling a house, you’re not a cash buyer.
2. Proceedable/non-proceedable: A silly jargon word really, but if you’re not in a position to immediately proceed with the purchase of a house, you’re not proceedable, usually because your own house hasn’t sold.
3. Mortgage Agreed/Decision in Principle: When you apply for a mortgage nowadays, they will give you an agreement or a decision in principle as to how much you can borrow. This usually applies just to first time buyers but is quite a useful thing to have if your estate agent wants to know how proceedable you are or if you’re going to be able to afford the purchase.
4. Conveyancing: When you buy a property, there are quite a lot of legal documents that have to be filled in and completed, like the land registry documents and contracts. While you can do it yourself (which we definitely wouldn’t recommend!), normally you’d appoint a conveyancing solicitor, who specialise in this area, to “convey” you into the property, generally doing most of the legal stuff for you. Just a word of warning, their prices can vary wildly, so do shop around.
5. Chains: When you buy a home, the person you’re buying off may be buying another home, as will the next person and so on until someone who is selling a home doesn’t want to buy anything else. This is called a chain. Generally, they all complete on the same day as the money has to move gradually from one property to another. While they can be unwieldy, they’re not to be afraid of and chains of four or more are not uncommon.
6. Exchange and Completion: Generally the final two points of the sale; you “exchange” contracts with your buyer/seller legally tying you to buy their house. You “complete” when the money has been paid to the seller and you take possession of the home.

We hope this helps but do ask us about anything specific and maybe we’ll do a second entry for the dictionary in the future!

Happy Birthday!

Today is a rather momentous day for SaleBoards: it’s our 5^th Birthday! That’s 5 years of striving to be different from other agents, to providing the best service we can and also, more importantly, 5 years of happy customers. It’s an obvious statement but, as most of our business comes by word of mouth, if we didn’t have happy customers, we wouldn’t still be here!

SaleBoards was formed in May 2007, just a few weeks before the start of the recession, a rather unfortunate time to set up a business one might think! However, the fact that we’re still going 5 years later is testimony to the fact that people want high quality service for a reasonable price and that people are still looking to move house and use agents to help them do so.

As to the important matter of birthday celebrations, I’m afraid they’re going to be rather low-key. Sad, I know, but this is our busiest time of year and we’re still keen to give the best service we can, even when we’ve got lots to celebrate. That said, you are always welcome to come in and join us for a tea/coffee and a chocolate or two if you’re passing by!

Tom

Welcome!

Hi there,

Welcome to the SaleBoards Blog, the blog linked to SaleBoards Estate Agents in Exeter. We’re a company who are trying to do things differently in the world of estate agency: one of the things we value most is our integrity. We never accept any form of benefit from potential purchasers and we do not profit from other services, such as mortgage sales or referral payments from solicitors. Our main goal is to give the highest possible level of estate agency service at a fair and honest price. This site here is to supply information and advice to our vendors and the wider public about what’s going on in the world of estate agency, how people can best sell their houses and other little tit-bits of information.

We hope you find this helpful and check out www.saleboards.co.uk for more information.