dothesums blog

Link: http://www.dothesums.co.uk/blog

I thought we had experienced every sort of maltreatment by estate agents and that their customer relations is bound to improve because of the recession?

Two weeks ago we arranged to view a property with a local agent. We saw the property on the Monday morning and made an offer at two o'clock the same day. The agent confirmed that our verbal offer had been accepted by the vendor. We arranged for our surveyor to carry out the survey and alerted our solicitor of the potential purchase, all by close of business that day.

At mid-day the next day we were informed that the vendor had accepted a higher offer, by which time our surveyor had been given keys to the property to carry out the survey by the same agent and we were invited to increase our offer. Which we obviously declined to do.

The bill for the survey is £360, which we shall have pay of course.

In our area about half of the estate branches have closed in the last eighteen months and the remainder are very quiet indeed. At the same time most of the agents we speak to are perplexed by their poor reputation. They just don't seem to get it?

In all of my experience in the public and private sectors, in engineering, construction, oil, education, management consultancy and financial services, I have never met a cohort with lower professional standards and an absence of integrity.

Which is a shame, because we as users of their service need treatment in a professional and honest manner, to progress our business. We fully realise that their customer is the vendor, but in other circumstances we could be a vendor. We buy a number of properties each year, but will not be using their services again, because we cannot trust their behaviour in looking after our money and costs. Integrity is a key issue in business; as long as they disregard it they will continue to decline.

Would you 'adam and eve' it?