Theme: Can Estate Agents be Worth Their Charges?
August 31, 2009Estate agents are often labeled as being the least loved of professional service providers in the UK, but it is really not apparent why as the vast majority of us carry on using them whenever we want to sell a home, particularly if we are hoping for a Quick Home Sale. One reason may be the fact that charges can seem quite huge in relation to the amount of time and effort put in to achieving that property sale. There would seem to be a general idea that estate agents more often than not make a lot of money for very tiny effort and that may perhaps the source of much of the national hatred.
However, the issue of excessive profits might well prove to be baseless. In the recent economic situation the property market has been very badly hit with transaction numbers falling to approximately half of normal levels. This means that the fee income from house sales by estate agents is down by a similar proportion and has caused genuine problems within the industry. Some estate agents have gone out of business, a lot have closed a big number of their offices and estate bureau staff have been made redundant all in an effort to cut costs in line with the reduced income. That seems to imply that most agents charges are not excessive, if they were we would see the industry dealing with the recession more comfortably.
Furthermore there is the competition issue. House sellers have a relatively wide choice of which agent to use in most areas and can shop around for the ideal commission rate. This healthy market competition will ensure keen pricing by most agents. Indeed, there are often instances of emerging new agencies which come into the market at much lower than average fees, but these hardly ever seem to last very long. It seems that those low fees are plainly unsustainable and it recommends that the current average fee of around 1.5% of sale price is most likely a good deal.
Comparison with estate bureau fees in other countries is interesting. Fees in America for example are around 5%, more than 3 times the UK average. It seems that the UK has one of the cheapest estate bureau fees structure amongst similar property markets.
There has been tiny to challenge the traditional estate agency. Recent launches of Do It Yourself property selling websites have made tiny progress and in any case estate agents have all embraced the web as an aid to selling houses. So whilst we continue to grumble about estate agents and their costs, we all continue to use their services. That recommends that we normally consider what they do to be relatively good value for money and that they can usually Sell Property Fast, or at least faster than trying it alone. For people currently demanding that the estate agents to“Sell my Property fast” it is encouraging to know that their aim is exactly the same as yours i.e. to earn some commission as swiftly as possible by selling the home fast.