If Hercules had faced a 13th Labour, it would have been househunting while holding down a full-time job. After arranging to view a property the other day, the estate agent sent me an email to confirm the appointment. It started, I kid you not, with ‘congratulations’ – almost as if in acknowledgement of how difficult the process had been.
I suppose, at least to some degree, you should expect buying a home to be stressful. It’s likely to be one of the biggest financial commitments you’ll ever make in your life. There are deposits to save, solicitors’ fees and stamp duty to resent, and mortgage brokers to convince your coffee habit does not represent cause for concern.
What I hadn’t fully appreciated was how much of that stress would arrive before I’d even made it through a front door. Having spent the past few months locked in a seeming ouroboros of phone calls, emails, text messages and repeat registrations, I’ve come to wonder whether estate agents have accidentally designed a system that makes the main thing they’re meant to do – show people houses – painfully difficult.
You begin by telling them your name, your budget and what you’re looking for in terms of size, condition, commute, parking and a garden. Then, having provided all this information very clearly, you’re rewarded with a steady stream of properties that bear only a passing resemblance to your criteria.
You want a house with three bedrooms that’s near a station; why wouldn’t you consider one with two bedrooms in the middle of nowhere? You want something that’s immediately livable, that doesn’t require much work and that you could move into tomorrow, but how about this bomb site that’s full of ‘character’? Oh, and it costs £50,000 more than what you said you can afford.
If you do get one or two that are a fit and decide you’d like to see them, then good luck! The estate agent always rings at the worst possible time: halfway through a meeting, while you’re boarding a train or on the loo. They leave a voicemail asking you to call them back. You do, but then they’re on a viewing, in a meeting or, more often than I suspect many of them would care to admit, they let it ring out because they’re on lunch.
The estate agent always rings at the worst possible time
Eventually, if you do get through, they often suggest a viewing takes place slap-bang in the middle of the working day. Naturally, most buyers can’t make these appointments. And so what you get is a bottleneck towards Saturday morning. This feels eminently avoidable. A few evening slots or offering viewings on a Sunday, or a simple shift rota that allows staff to work different hours, would go a long way towards delivering a more customer-friendly experience. Plenty of other industries have figured this out without too much fuss.
If you do manage to make it through this rigmarole, though, and you find yourself physically standing in a house for sale, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the person showing you round to know a bit about it. Yet often they don’t.
Guided by one fresh-faced Saturday boy at a property a fortnight ago, my wife and I had a few questions: how long has the house been on the market? Has it ever had an issue with damp? When was the boiler fitted? Could we take a look up in the loft? The answers came back: ‘Not sure. I don’t know. I’ll have to check. No.’
I get that there’s an element of theatre in any form of sales. Good estate agents, however, should understand the limits of that performance. They can sing a house’s praises, yes, but they shouldn’t try to deny its faults. A small house might well be ‘easy to keep on top of’, but it’s still small. A house next to a train track might be handy for the commute, but if the walls shake every half an hour, then that probably will have an impact on your sleep.
Recently my wife and I saw a house that had a computer desk and a chair on its first-floor landing, which a straight-faced estate agent described as ‘the office’. Another assured us that a box room that was already breathing in with a single bed could ‘definitely’ fit a double. And then there was a ‘five-bedroom house’ that looked less like a family abode and more like a badly played game of Tetris. Extensions and conversions were clumsily thrown together, but that was apparently ‘creatively utilised space’.
As estate agents invest more heavily in marketing beyond the traditional housing portals, there’s a new emphasis on building direct relationships with consumers. The latest Voice of the Agent report, based on responses from nearly 500 UK estate agents, found that the average firm spends around seven per cent of its income on marketing activity outside of aggregators like Rightmove or Zoopla – with that figure rising to almost 12 per cent among growth firms.
You’d think that a more direct approach would lead to more honesty and a curated, personal service. A good estate agent, to my mind, shouldn’t waste your time with unsuitable listings or call just to ‘check in’. They should call because they have something genuinely useful to say. They should give realistic insights into the state of a house and a seller’s appetite to negotiate.
In an alleged buyer’s market, it is baffling that customer service and operational efficiency do not appear to be priorities. A house purchase is always going to be stressful up to a point. But when an email confirming a viewing starts with ‘congratulations’ maybe the property industry needs to ask itself why that now feels like something worth celebrating rather than simply being the first step towards a deal getting done.
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