Sellers: When picking an estate agent

[sadie]

This might be a good way to pick an estate agent to sell your house. Go to Daft and do an Advanced Search. Pick your location(s) and then select Sale Agreed button only down the bottom. Then you can check the performance of your local Estate Agents over the past 4 months by comparing how many Sales they have Agreed. When selecting an agent to sell my mother's house, I see that they have in fact only had 1 sale agreed in the past 4 months, and strangely they charge the biggest fee. To the layman it would surely seem that the agent that is turning over the most houses in the area would be the one to go for, unless it's not that simple or the data is inaccurate.

 

[angela59]

Hi Sadie,

I wonder how accurate this information is on daft. To give you an example like you I have studied the sale agreeds and the one agent keeps coming up all the time as having sold the most houses - it is a large rural town I'm talking about and there are several other auctioneers - is it that the other auctioneers don't bother to post this information or else there is only one auctioneer doing all the business and then when I check the agreement date it keeps changing every week - i.e. some of the agreements date on a particular house were say dated 8th Jan 08 and then I look up a week or so later and the agreement date is 15th Jan 08 on the same property and this happens over and over again - I'm a bit baffeled myself.