Updating Estate Agents Blogs

I have to admit it's quite hard to produce regular, interesting and original content for the imove estate agents blog.  My email inbox is full of SEO email tips and advice, all of which keep telling me to post original content to the imove blog to attract visitors.  Easier said than done.

Anyway slightly off-topic but I thought I wouold let anyone who is interested know that if you do own a blogger template (this one is) then changing the design of the template is very easy.  I am not going to repeat 'how to change your blogger template' as there are thousands of free pages already available.  But did you know there are also hundreds, possibly thousands of completely free Blogger templates?

A quick Google search will find you tons of free Blogger templates.  I have changed ours today just to freshen it up a little.

Vendor’s Sell Houses Better Than Estate Agents

Is it really any surprise when you turn up to view your dream home that you will be given the grand tour by non other than the part-time chap who works in the factory mid-week and your friendly local estate agents at the weekends? 

I’m not having a dig at those people that have two jobs to make ends meet, let’s be honest he probably works a lot harder than most full-time estate agents, but really is he trained sufficiently to show buyers around properties?  I mean does he know ‘everything’ about your possible dream home, the biggest money spend of your life?  You’re not going to reach for your purse and blow £550,000 without knowing everything about a property, right?  Will the agent know how long it takes to get to the local school in rush hour traffic on a Monday morning?  What are the neighbours like?  And I don’t mean are they nice or potential terrorists, what are they really like?

It amazes me (and it will blow your mind for sure) when you realise that the vast majority of estate agents are almost completely untrained, totally lacking in any real knowledge of property transactions and void of any background information on the properties they are selling.

I remember turning up at my first day for work at a very well known firm of estate agents in one of the garden cities.  I was thinking, probably like you, that I would be enrolled on a two week intensive course of ‘property wisdom’, I would literally be stuffed with knowledge, I would boar my friends on a Friday night in the pub with my new property encyclopaedia style knowledge.  No, my Manager at the time, a middle aged northern chap called it ‘training-on-the-job’. 

There was some more formal training further down the line, but it was training on how to win more sales, how to sell more of this, how to sell more of that.  Almost nothing on the technical side of property law, nothing on marketing and defiantly nothing on customer service.

So my ‘on-the-job training’ consisted of doing the job mixed in with a lot of guess work.  My first ever viewing was a farce.  I showed a lovely couple from Wales a £250,000 detached house.  The owners had ‘entrusted’ the viewings to the estate agent (err that was me!).  Everything was going fine (when I say that what I really mean is I stood at the front door whilst the viewers wondered around the house on their own) up until the viewers first question.  It went something like this “Young man, the AGA in the kitchen, I assume it’s included in the price”?  I paused for about, well let’s call it a nano-second and said “I think so, yes I think so, yes I think it is”  (that’s a yes then).

I am sure reading this you can guess what happened next, I really don’t want to detail exactly what obscenities the owner shouted down the phone to me the next day when it kind of popped up midway through negotiating that buyers offer that the AGA was included in the sale.  How was I to know that an AGA costs £6,000?  It didn’t matter that much anyway because the buyer withdrew their offer the following weekend when my Manager was debating whether AGA’s can control the central heating with the very happy (prior to that phone call) buyer.  Of course AGA’s don’t control heating, or hot water, they are just very nice cookers

Was I completely at fault?  I was 18, born in a large inner city town, I had never even seen an AGA until that first viewing.  Doesn’t everyone leave their cooker?

Well I am going to say it was down to my lack of training.  Sure the estate agents course wouldn’t contain a half hour session on joys of owning an AGA, but any estate agents training course would have taught me what to say when asked a question to which I could not 100% say I knew the answer to.

You will be surprised to hear that my point is not that estate agents are not trained in how to actually conduct a good viewing of a property, but actually that estate agents should not be the one’s showing people a property, it should be the owner. 

Who knows a property best?  Who knows how the heating works and roughly what it costs to operate in the winter? Who knows the short cut to the school, and better still what is the local school like?  Who knows when the fences were last maintained? How does that shared driveway work with the neighbour?  I could go on (but I won’t).

The point is nobody knows the property like the owner.  So wherever possible the viewing should be done by the owner.  And anyway do any of your buyers out there want an estate agent to ‘sell’ you the property?  Let’s be honest there isn’t anything an agent could tell you that would make you fall in love with a property that you just didn’t like is there?  You either love it and want it now (the property that is), it ticks some of the boxes and you might come back once you have seen some potentially better properties or you don’t like it and it’s not an option.  Did you need a ‘trained’ estate agent to help you make that decision?

In fact what I have learnt over the past fifteen years is that quite often it’s the small tangible things that are important to many buyers.  I remember once back in my home town, showing a nice little three bedroom 1930’s house to a buyer.  At the end of the viewing they said they weren’t interested, I can’t remember they’re excuse, but they weren’t interested.  Just before they were about to leave the house the chap pointed at a door under the stairs and said “that’s just a small cupboard right”?  And with all my training brimming to the surface, ensuring that I gave a professional, honest answer, I replied “I am not sure how big the cupboard is sir, shall we open it and take a look”?

It turned out to be the largest under-stairs cupboard I have ever seen, it was huge.  Having been knocked through to an old coal shed that was part of the property, what was a standard run of the mill 1930’s under-stairs broom cupboard was now a very large walk-in cupboard.  Needless to say the couple made a full-asking price offer that same day.  All based on the fact that the property had this massive cupboard!

If the owner was present at the viewing, they would have discussed the cupboard with the buyer.

This article is starting to sound like a parody of my worst moments as an estate agent, but can we honestly expect every member of staff of an estate agents office to know the intimate details of every single property they have on the market?  Some agencies have in excess of 150 properties on the market at any one time, some firm’s employ 15-20 members of staff, some part-time and some full-time, can we expect each and every employ of the firm to know every single detail about each property?  No of course we can’t, it’s just not practical or realistic.

I know there will be some people reading this who will say this isn’t a problem and if an agent doesn’t know the answer to a question they just find out the answer and get back to the buyer.  And yes in the ideal world that should happen, but the reality is, it doesn’t.  Ask anyone who has been house-hunting, do estate agents call you back?  Do agents come back to you with answers to questions? 

I would however say that even the most experienced house seller should research what to say and what not to say before they launch themselves in to showing people around their property.  A quick Google search or even asking your friendly ‘experienced’ agent should do the trick.