mooves

We are property professionals. Purchasing a house is the most important financial commitment of your life. You certainly do not want to entrust this process to someone you do not know. Of course this is correct. Howvever, lets look at an example, in fact a real one. You are lucky to have a house worth £1.0m. You engage a reputable agent, who is willing to vet and show prospective buyers around on your behalf. There is an ultra glossy brochure and an entry into a Sunday Newspaper. The house sells, fantastic. You bought the property before that current boom & made a mint. Jolly hockey sticks all round. However, you were charged 2.5% for this, thats £25,000.

Well properties at this sort of price tend to be period one's, in the right area and will hence sell very quickly in any market.

If you like throwing money away, great. It is your right. But you would have been better off giving some of the cash to charity! Even if your house is worth a fraction of this example, the same rules apply and so does the same question. Is it value for money? mooves leave you to decide.

Obviously, most houses sold are substantially less in value, but ask yourself. How much is the cost of the advertising / marketing?

Why do estate agents get paid so much for doing nothing? This is not exactly true. Estate Agents deal with people. We all know that individuals are like ‘chalk and cheese'. Some are relaxed others are neurotics. This goes for both vendors and purchasers. Sometime prices are unreal and this makes it hard to sell the property. In these circumstances a great deal of work and cost can be incurred.

This is not the norm. Delays may occur in the overall process with some blips (some major). However, the vast majority of properties sell themselves and most people are normal! The estate agents have databases full of prospective buyers. Thus, matching buyers with properties is relatively straight forward. So apart from sending circulars to prospective buyers, telephone costs, marketing, advertising and other costs are non-existent.

If you confront an estate agent with this, the reply will be, “you paid for access to our database of buyers and this has got your sale”. OK, it got the sale but we only instructed you verbally two days ago, I have received no particulars of sale of the property, you have not advertised it marketed it etc etc. It has cost you nothing. We told you we have buyers waiting and you signed our terms od acceptance.

OK, so we grudgingly accept this, let say 1.5% on £100,000. So £1,500 is fair reward for very little effort and very little cost incurred. This is what bugs people. This story will be familiar to many. It leaves a sour taste and gives the profession negative press.

No sale no fee. This is stated by all agents from here to Mars as key aspect of their business. To break this rule is sacrosanct. This is a misnomer, as any (see earlier) marketing and advertising costs are recouped within the fee generally set at 1 to 3%.

At mooves it is simple one simple fee to cover our administration and technology costs. That's it.

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