Well, Mary Portas’s programme last night on the business of estate agency has certainly upset alot of people in the industry. But for my money she raised some important issues about the kind of customer service we deliver to buyers and some of it, sadly, wasn’t pretty.
Of course, there are many hard working and professional people in estate agents’ offices around the country who deliver excellent customer service, but it is also true that some of the criticisms highlighted in the show are valid. It is easy for the industry to call the whole thing a “circus” and to stick its head in the sand (see reaction of industry magazine Estate Agent Today below), but some of the lazy practices considered the norm do our image no good.
http://www.estateagenttoday.co.uk/news_features/Mary-Portas-programme-on-agents-slammed-as-a-circus
We were once joint agents with another company in Somerset on a farm that had pylons running right across its land withing 50 metres of the house. As you turned the corner at the end of their drive, there they were, yet they never featured once on the other agent’s glossy brochure. I’m not saying we made a big feature of them but at least on our brochure and web site there were pictures showing them as I didn’t want a conversation with an angry buyer having just driven all the way from the Home Counties to see the property.
So Mary Portas has a point – we must stop treating buyers as idiots and give them the facts about the properties we are selling. After all, every house has its good and bad points – if it didn’t then it would probably be above most people’s budget.