How sellers can suss out the agents that are less than honest
HOW dirty is your estate agent? We congratulate Alex Goldstein on his recent feature in The Yorkshire Post about underhand tactics in the industry.
The ghost viewing he describes is said not only on good authority but has been corroborated, so sellers beware. In my experience, underhand methods have a tendency to become endemic in a declining market.
For some rogue agents, false promises are standard practice. The range spans from well-intended assurances, loosely based on truths, to outright lies.
Sellers would be well advised to accept nothing at face value and to ask their agent to substantiate any wild claims. After all, who would want to entrust the sale of their property to an estate agent whose well-rehearsed and persuasive argument is based on a false premise?
So, just what are the clichéd lines delivered by those agents eager to cut an on-the-spot deal and how do you check the veracity of the claims?
“We’ve got a number of cash buyers lined up.” This may indeed be an honest claim, although unlikely in today’s market, so don’t hesitate to ask for identities and details. Exactly how many?
What do you mean by ‘cash’ and are they truly proceedable? If the buyers disappear a few days later, there may be a valid explanation but do press the agent to explain.
“We’ve recently sold six properties in your area.” This is easy to corroborate. Ask for more information about precisely where and when, as ‘recently’ means different things to different people, and what prices were achieved?
Interestingly, fact-checking can work both ways. We the estate agent sometimes need to ask the seller, courteously, to explain their reason for not instructing us when we feel that we have presented the stronger argument.
“We’ve decided to go with the agent that offers national coverage”, is a statement that should be met with a spirited response. Misconceptions about local independent agents and their supposed lack of ‘national coverage’ proliferate.
Perhaps we are guilty of not making our case clearer. However, more often than not, the source can be traced to a hapless estate agent and a lazy, throwaway comment. Occasionally, it can be traced to a well-informed professional with a cynical pitch.
The sources are threefold: It might have been dreamt up by the marketing department of a large corporate estate agency, perilously hanging on to a line of reasoning unchanged in a generation.
“Of course, our national coverage sets us apart from independent agents.” They know as well as we do that the march of progress in conjunction with the unassailable rise of property portals has put an end to this.
More often than not, these empty declarations fall onto deaf ears, but sometimes they don’t.
After all, we have to question the presumption that a disparate network of regional offices equates to ‘national coverage’. It is certainly not an argument for achieving a stronger sales outcome.
Finally, it might come from an independent agent who has signed up to a decades-old scam that works on the premise that paying for a space in a Mayfair office will automatically turn their home-grown service global. It does not.
We believe that it’s difficult to beat a thriving business that is rooted in the region, independent of thought, and has someone at the helm who values the staff.