Agent anguish - 17 August 2009

Posted by Paul Collins No comments

Estate agents still have one of the worst reputations of any profession out there. Despite recently having been caught and passed in terms of popular hatred by bankers and their huge bonuses, there is little doubt that estate agents still engender roughly the same affection from the public as tax collectors, traffic wardens and dentists. Unfortunately, I was on the receiving end of an unprofessional agent this weekend – and it has left a bitter taste in my mouth.

While most of the tabloid press is happy to continue to entertain this idea for the consumption of the general public at large, from my position working in the property industry, I am able to see the best and worst of the profession. There are estate agents out there who are superb – many of them go above and beyond what is required of them to help their customers on both sides of the sale, much of it unmentioned and unrecognized.

However, there are plenty of incidents of estate agents being unprofessional and unreliable, and these are just too frequent to ignore. There is little doubt that standards in the industry are much, much higher than they have ever been, and the level of professionalism in estate agency is several times what it was ten years ago – I have been pleasantly surprised in the past by agents with bad reputations being wholly professional. However, there is still a long way to go before estates agents can have any degree of pride over their levels of service in general.

My partner and I had made an appointment to view a couple of properties which are being sold off along with the rest of a huge farm in the West Yorkshire countryside. The sale appears to be a complicated one, with numerous lots including houses, farming and grazing land, and working farm buildings all being offered either separately or as one huge lot. The total of the sale adds up to seven houses, several farm buildings and over 290 acres of land.

Having made an appointment on Thursday last week to view four of the properties on Saturday morning, we didn’t hear anything more from the agent in question to confirm the viewing or otherwise. As most people do, we had arranged our day accordingly around the appointment, but decided to call the office in the morning to confirm as the agent we were meeting hadn’t answered the phone on Friday.

That call prompted a frantic 90 minutes or so for our agent’s poor colleague who was manning the office Saturday morning. No record existed of our appointment; the two agents in that department weren’t available, and my blood pressure was gradually rising.

After what must have been several phone calls and inconveniences, we received a call to say that the owner of the property was luckily available to show us around, but that no-one from the estate agent would be available to come and talk to us. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue for me, but with a sale as complex as this one clearly is, one might think they would be keen to be on hand to answer any questions we might have had.

In the end, the farm owner was more than amenable in showing us his properties, and we probably got a much more honest viewing than would have been that case with an agent in attendance.

However, it is now past midday on Monday morning, and we are still to receive a follow-up call from the agents, let alone any form of apology for the mix-up. This is the kind of thing that makes people hate dealing with estate agents, and makes the general public suspicious of the profession. One might think that in the present climate every effort would be made to help out anyone showing the slightest bit of interest in a property for sale.

For all the agent knows we could have travelled up from London specifically to view and discuss those properties. We could have been cash buyers ready to put down a deposit on the spot, for the full asking price. As it is, I’m left with a deep suspicion of this particular agent, and will go out of my way to avoid dealing with them for my personal property requirements. All I’m left with now is the prospect of making their day very uncomfortable when they do deign to place a follow-up call.

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