Three facts to find out from estate agents
What if I said you could find out three facts about the estate agents you’ve invited to meet up with and get a pretty accurate idea of how good they are, rather than listening to sales pitch after sales pitch? Sounds good, I bet? Would you ask about their fees? How about the price they’d put your home on for? Of course you would and those answers would be important to you, but there are three questions you really need to be asking to work out exactly how good the agent is. Have a look below to find out more.
Question 1. Are you selling what you’re listing?
As the graph below illustrates, there’s quite a lot of variety between different agents actual success rates. Some may have lots of property on their books but are they selling it or just listing it? Are you about to use an agent that sells four fifths of what they take on or one that sells less than half?
Question 2. How accurate are your valuations?
Lets use some basic maths to quantify the differences in the graph below. The average asking price in Bath as of Oct 2019 is about £407,000. If the top agent in the graph gets 97.3% thats around £396,000. The bottom agent only gets 94.3% on average or £383,000. That works out to a £13,000 difference on average between the most and least accurate agent.
Question 3. How long will you take to sell my home?
Given how long solicitors take to get to completion, don’t expect the real answer to be a fortnight or so! However, do you want it to take three months or five and a half? Some people don’t mind waiting of course but, the longer a property is on the market, the more buyers get suspicious as to why.
If you don’t want to ask the agents then you can do a bit of homework before you meet them. The majority of the above information is publicly available online – you could look at all the properties an agent has to see how many are listed as SSTC (assuming they keep their websites up to date) or sites like GetAgent and Allagents will give you specific performance data on individual agents.
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