"Do you want to waste your valuable equity and get ripped off by an office based variable fee estate agent? Of course not, so read on."

Welcome to ‘Insight’ the essential information guide that every homeowner should read. This will provide you with important facts and information that all homeowners need to know when you are considering which agent to select marketing your home or if you are already doing so. 

Amongst many things, we will dispel some myths about what agents can and cannot do with regards to marketing and ‘selling’ property and show you how the majority of homeowners in the U.K. waste thousands of pounds of their valuable equity every year. We will also give examples of how unethical most agents can be. 

If you have experienced any examples of over-promising, under-delivering, unethical behaviour and bad practice etc whilst marketing with an office based, variable fee agent, then please let us know by emailing: bracknell@redhomes.co.uk. We can then add them on to the list.

We will cover the following items:

• How the market works today and how to use it to your advantage.
• Other Estate Agent’s unfair variable fees.
• The service Agents say they provide. 
• The service you actually receive.
• What they do for their money.
• What they waste/spend your valuable equity on
• The spin of the ‘sales pitch’ and what the content actually means in reality.
• Where the majority are buyers are sourced from.

But first let’s start with this simple fact.

The only criteria that dictates how many viewings a property gets and how quickly it sells is THE PRICE as the location and condition are always reflected in that.
It’s certainly not the agent regardless of what false promises some make about their so called ‘selling skills’, their ‘experience’, how long they have been established, what they have to offer, the value and how quickly they can sell it. IT’S THE PRICE, always has been, always will be.

Just think about it logically. Would you allow any agent to persuade you to buy a property that:
a. you knew to be overpriced
b. that you didn’t like or
c. you couldn’t afford... Of course you wouldn’t, so why would anyone else?
An agent hasn’t been born yet that could persuade any buyer to do any of those three things. 

Estate Agents Fees. What are they based on? 

Answer: Their overheads of course and not on the service they provide.
Yes overheads, what else did you think they spend your money on? Something that actually benefits you the homeowner!! Of course not!! The only relevant exception is property portal marketing.
e.g. their overheads include the expensive rents and rates on their useless, expensive luxury offices which no-one visits anymore because almost 100% of buyers go direct to the property portals principally Rightmove. Employees National Insurance contributions, company cars, office parties, bonuses, trips abroad, corporate days out driving racing cars etc, etc, etc, the list is endless and it’s all stuff that you don’t benefit from!!! 

Here's a perfect example.

The agent who is 'perceived' to be the most prominent and well established in Bracknell, is currently building a brand new multi-million pound office in Bracknell. Who is contributing to the cost? Their past and present vendors. And it's of no benefit to them whatsoever! A considerable percentage of each one of their clients valuable equity is contributing to a white elephant. Along with all of their usual advertising, this white elephant will be used to continue attracting naive and gullible vendors into thinking that 'somehow' this office will help them sell their property. How wrong could they be. 

Is this what you pay an agent for? Is this want you really want your hard earned money, your valuable equity to be spent on?
Or, would you rather have more of your valuable equity left on the completion of your sale to spend on something benefitting you and your family instead of an agent? Of course you would! You would have to be either insane, selfish, naive, gullible, totally irresponsible or all five of those things to deliberately and unnecessarily pay more than our fee to another agent to market your property.     

We have proved consistently over the last seven years that agents DO NOT need useless expensive offices to sell their clients property. The Red Homes group of agents has sold thousands of properties of all types WITHOUT the use of an office.  

OTHER AGENTS VARIABLE FEES

They are extremely unfair and unjustified. Let’s explain in more detail.

One particular agent in Bracknell regularly advertises a 25% discount on their normal/standard rate. Doesn’t that sound great??!!....BUT, for some reason they never advertise what their normal/standard rate is!! What is it then? Does it change on a weekly or daily basis? Is it 3%, 2.5%, 2% or whatever he thinks he can get away with? And when you call the office to ask what his standard rate is, they say they have to visit to discuss that! Why can't they just tell you what their standard rate is immediately?

Why are most office based variable fee agents so reluctant to advertise their normal/standard fee? We advertise ours on our marketing literature, why can’t they do the same? Do you think they may be trying to mislead the home owning public into thinking they are getting money off during the haggling process? The same technique is used in selling double glazing. Start at an inflated figure with the aim to get as much as they possibly can without any justification whatsoever. 

Why should home owners have to haggle about reducing the fee? If agent's seriously had their vendor’s interests at heart then why don’t they offer their lowest fee immediately and why don’t they charge all of their customers the same percentage? 

Answer: because they are trying to squeeze as much as possible from every single home owner without any justification whatsoever and do not work in the home owners best interest, only their own.

Question: So, how do you benefit by paying an unfair variable fee agent more than our fee?
Answer: You don’t!!

Almost 100% of home owners that are currently marketing with an unfair variable fee agent are being charged from 1% to 2½% and in some cases even more.
Of course agents will try to justify their fee and come up with 101 reasons why it should be and they may sound feasible at the time but in reality it’s an excuse to squeeze as much as possible from every single homeowner. They will ‘sell’ you their marketing strategy and bombard you with statistics which all sounds fantastic and unique but in reality it counts for very little as nearly 100% of buyers come via an internet property portal.
So knowing that fact, if the majority of agents are using property portals to advertise ALL of their portfolio, why do some charge more than others? Because of their overheads!!

Does this mean that whoever pays more gets a better service or something extra than those who are paying less to the same agent? Of course not, it's based on their overheads which you don't benefit from! An unfair variable fee always means that some home owners will pay more than others who are selling through the same agent? Is that fair, is that right, is that ethical? Of course not!!

So why do almost 100% of all office based agents charge an unfair variable selling fee?

Answer: Historically that’s the way it’s always been and the law allows them to get away with it. The industry as a whole is dominated by office based agents who charge an unfair variable fee. It’s not in their interest to inform the home owning public of the way property is marketed and sold today due to the influence and easy access of the internet. The truth is that it has radically altered since agents started using the property portals to market ALL of their property.

So you need to ask yourself these questions:
If you were buying a car and two identical vehicles came off the conveyor belt and were next to each other on the forecourt but one was £4,000 more than the other for no good reason whatsoever, which one would you buy?
Answer: The cheaper one of course. So why pay more than is necessary to sell your property? You get nothing extra for it.

Would you go to the bank, draw out thousands of pounds and give it away to the first stranger you saw on the street? Would you throw it down the drain? Would you burn it? Would you do any of these things under any normal circumstance? 

Answer: Of course you wouldn’t, you would have to be deranged. So why do it when you sell your home?

If you had the opportunity to save thousands of pounds of your valuable equity to spend on you, your children or grandchildren e.g. their education or something else that benefits them or giving it to an estate agent of all people, who would you choose?

Answer: You, your children and grandchildren of course. You would have to be mad, extremely selfish or totally irresponsible to choose the agent. But unfortunately thousands of homeowners do that every year by instructing an unfair variable fee agent to sell their home.

Did you know that shortly after the beginning of the crash in 2008 many office based variable fee agents INCREASED their fees to compensate for their reduced income. Hmmm……... How does that work in the vendor’s interest? Why should homeowners be expected to make up the shortfall in estate agents income? 

Every year thousands of home owners mistakenly choose an agent based on the following criteria:

• The most established agent.
• The one who gives them the highest valuation
• The one with the highest board presence
• Snobbery. Yes. Many irresponsible and silly home owners are willing to waste thousands of pounds of their valuable equity, money that could have provided a better education for their children/grandchildren etc just so they they can tell their friends and neighbors that they sold with the most expensive/prominent agent in town.  

Unfortunately using this criteria always costs the vendor thousands of pounds more but for no extra benefit.

Estate Agent sales are based on numbers. 

Some agents use state on valuations that they sell more property than any other agent in town. Is that any surprise if they have the most property on their portfolio? It's what you would expect isn't it? And why do they have the most property on their books? Answer: because their clients have been naive and/or gullible by believing the tripe the agent has told them to justify their extortionate fee! 

The simple fact is that the more property any agent has on their portfolio, the more they will sell. It’s the simple law of averages and percentages. 
It’s got nothing to do with any particular agent ‘being better’ at selling property because ANY agent can sell ANY property as it’s THE PRICE that will dictate how quickly it sells and not the agent, regardless of how they promote themselves.

The ‘Service’ agents provide.
As the majority of buyers come from the internet because almost 100% of agents use the internet property portals to advertise ALL of their vendors properties, why and what do some 'super' agents claim to do that is something extra or different to other agents?
Do they have a secret database of buyers, an exclusive list that no other agent has access to? Is there a bottomless pit of buyers that they can dip into whenever it suits them and pluck buyers out at any time? 
Answer: Of course not. Because if that was true then all properties would sell immediately. 

Regardless of where buyers may be located, when they start their search for property in any location they will automatically go onto a property portal and the majority will use ‘Rightmove’ initially,

For example, let’s take Bracknell which is typical of most towns in the U.K. with ALL of the agents using ‘Rightmove’ as their prime source of advertising and sourcing buyers.
If a buyer is looking to relocate to Bracknell from Newcastle, all they have to do is look on ‘Rightmove’ and they can view EVERY SINGLE PROPERTY FOR SALE in Bracknell. Once they have seen a property that matches their criteria they will contact the agent to arrange a viewing.
Do the buyers care who the agent is? Of course not! It could be Joe Bloggs & Co, all they care about is the property NOT the agent, regardless of how large, medium or small that agent may be.

Some 'SUPER AGENTS' are extremely good at ‘selling their service’ and their company. Here are seven examples of statements they make when trying to gain your instruction.

1. “Mrs Jones, we have numerous offices so your property gets more exposure". 

Really? How does that work in reality? How does having lots of offices benefit you the vendor? Answer. It doesn't. How could it? Remember the example above with the guy in Newcastle looking for property in Bracknell? If Red Homes had an agent in Newcastle, what difference would that make to the buyer if he's looking to buy in Bracknell? Why would that buyer go into our Newcastle office to ask about Bracknell properties when he can look at every single one on the internet in the comfort of his own home?   

2. "Mrs Jones we advertise your property in the local paper offering more extensive coverage, more than any other agent in town”. 

Really, how does that work. Let’s examine that statement in detail. 

Over the last two and a half years statistics show that nearly 100% of all property papers in the U.K. have seen a dramatic reduction in advertising and readership and nearly 40% of all property papers in the U.K. have ceased publishing altogether since 2008. This trend is continuing and many are no longer published in their original format for two reasons.
1. Agents advertise less because they know it doesn’t help to sell property.
2. Nearly 100% of buyers use the internet to source their property.

Let’s expand on those two points.

The industry as a whole knows but will never admit that property paper advertising very rarely works. When the property market crashed in 2007/08, agents throughout the U.K. experienced a dramatic reduction in the number of house sales and consequently income, so almost every agent began to cut their overheads. The first thing they cut was paper advertising hence the reduction in the number of property papers available.

Again, take Bracknell for example. We used to get TWO free pull out property papers delivered to every household on a weekly basis. But for the last fours years, one of those can only be sourced from various outlets and the other is now just a section within the main paper and neither get delivered to every household.

So why do some agents continue to advertise in the paper?
Simple. Agents use property paper advertising to self-promote and con the vendor into signing with them. It's used to gain new instructions and NOT as a tool for selling property. It is used as part of the overall ‘selling’ spin.
e.g. Let’s look at a couple of agents in Bracknell who have offices in other locations. At any given time these Bracknell offices have between 80 too 150 properties for sale. Most weeks they take out one page of advertising per office which may showcase 10 properties if you are lucky. That means that even if they rotated all of their properties on a weekly basis, the likelihood is that each property will only be advertised once every 8 to 15 weeks!!!! And that is supposed to be an aid to selling? Pull the other one.

3. “Mrs Jones, it costs you nothing extra by paying our fee because we build our fee into the asking price and we achieve higher prices than other agents”

Remember the earlier points a, b and c!! 

Are they seriously suggesting that they can persuade buyers who have a maximum budget dictated by their lender to go above and beyond that?

Are they seriously suggesting that you or any other buyer can be persuaded by them to pay over the correct value of any property? 

Are they seriously suggesting that they can persuade someone to buy a property they don’t like?

Of course they can't. They couldn't persuade you so why should anyone else be persuaded?

4. “Mrs Jones we have buyers waiting to view and purchase your home”

Really? That's great......but hang on a minute. If that was true then why haven’t they sold all of the other properties they have on their books that are similar or the same as Mrs Jones and cheaper??? And if they have buyers waiting then SURELY it should be sold within a couple of hours or on the same day?

Hmmm…..there’s something not quite right here. If it’s going to be sold so quickly then why do they want you to sign up for 16 – 20 weeks with a sole selling agreement and why do they want to charge you so much for doing very little towards the sale? After all, according to them, all it takes is a couple of phone calls to 'waiting' buyers. Hardly breaking into a sweat is it? So why the high fees? 

5. “We sell more property than any other agent in the area”

Yes, that’s true with some agents but why is that? It’s simple, it's obvious. Because they have the most property on their books so you would expect them too!! No surprise there then. Don’t forget what we said earlier. Sales within the industry are based on numbers, the more you’ve got, the more you sell. It’s not rocket science is it?

6. “Because we have an office we get an enormous amount of ‘footflow’, i.e. the visiting public.

Really!! So homeowners with very little time to spare drive to the Town Centre, park up and walk to the agent’s office, instead of looking on the internet in the comfort of their own home? Have you seen the location of many agents? You'd need to carry rations as it would take you half a day to walk there!

7. “We think your house is worth much more than what the other agents have said and we guarantee to get more for you”

Mrs Jones: "That's fantastic, how can you do that Mr Super Agent?"

Mr Super Agent: "errr.....because Mrs Jones we have been blessed with extraordinary, hypnotic supernatural powers that can persuade anyone to buy property they can't afford, don't like and know to be overpriced and if you don't believe me ask the Tooth Fairy". 

Mrs Jones: "That's wonderful Mr Super Agent, let me sign up immediately and please charge me whatever you like because you are worth every penny of my valuable equity". 

Regarding these last 7 points. Do you think that they might be just telling you what you want to hear just to gain the instruction???
If all of those statement were true, then how do they explain why they haven’t sold all of the other properties they have on their books immediately? Hmmm………something doesn’t stack up there does it?

Independent statistics and the industries own figures show that:

a. nearly 100% of all buyers come via an internet property portal
b. ‘footflow’ into agent’s offices has dramatically reduced to virtually nothing across most parts of the U.K. and that’s why over the last two and a half years, thousands of office based agents have closed down with many of them now working from home as low fee agents. They realised offices are totally unnecessary for successfully selling property.
c. property papers are in decline as more and more agents realise it’s a waste of money

Unfortunately it’s a sad statistic that the majority of homeowners will instruct the agent who has given the greater value and swallowed all of the spin, only to find a couple of weeks later that the agent is putting pressure on them to reduce by thousands. What happened to the people waiting to buy their house and getting more money for it than any other agent? Oh well, some vendors have to learn the hard way.

All of the above statements made by those agents are of course complete tripe. On first hearing them it all sounds great but in reality it’s just spin, smoke and mirrors and unfortunately most homeowners in the U.K. fall for it and the agents are laughing all the way to the bank with a large chunk of their vendor’s valuable equity. The phrase most commonly used within the industry by these agents is "like shooting fish in a barrel".
Don’t forget, almost 100% of buyers come via an internet property portal so what ‘extra service’ can that agent provide that finds buyers from other sources?

The only difference between agents today is the fee and the level of personal service.
All agents use the same format e.g. marketing on the internet, contacting some buyers on the phone, sending out property details either by email or post etc. What else do you think they do?

In summary:

• Unfair variable fees are totally unjustified and are only based on the agent’s overheads and not on the service they provide. Homeowners paying more than 1% to any agent are getting robbed.
• Vendors marketing their properties with agents other than Red Homes or similar fixed fee agents are wasting thousands of pounds of their hard earned money, their valuable equity for nothing extra whatsoever.
• Almost 100% of buyers come via an internet property portal.
• Newspaper advertising is only used to self-promote the agent & to gain the instruction and not to sell their vendors property.
• Most agents routinely overvalue property just to get the instruction.

Other questions you need to ask yourself if you believe that variable fee agents when they say that they are working in your best interest. 

Why should you have to haggle over the fee or the length of the agreement?

Why don’t agents offer their lowest fee & agreement period immediately?

Why don’t other agents advertise their fee on their literature as we do?

Why don’t other agents charge a fixed percentage as we do?

Why should you pay for the agent’s overheads?

Why should you be charged an unfair variable fee?

Why should you pay more than another vendor who is selling with the same agent?

Do you want an unfair variable fee agent to be having fun spending your money, a large chunk of your valuable equity or would you like to spend it on yourself and your family?

Did you know that:

• You have no obligation whatsoever to sell with the agent that you may be buying from or to use the other services offered by an agent. In fact independent observers state that it is not wise to do so as most agents place a huge referral fee on top which the buyer/vendor has to pay for, which is yet another waste of your money, your equity, which benefits the agent and not you.
• Most agents only work in their own interest and not their vendor. e.g. chain building. Some agents do not put every offer forward to their vendor if it doesn’t suit them e.g. If an agent gets two offers, one from a buyer with nothing to sell and one from a buyer with a property to sell and they think they may have the opportunity to sell it, whose offer do you think they will put forward? Logically you would think the one with nothing to sell but you would be wrong! Why?

The two significant reasons for this are:

• They have to keep their stock levels up i.e. sell and replace.
• Their agenda is to build chains of sales which are common practice within the industry but it’s one of the best kept secrets. Don’t forget that they more they get in a single chain the more money they get on completion.

After all you would never know if you were getting the best buyer as you only make your decision on who you want to buy your house based what the agent tells you. After all they haven’t got the ‘dishonest’ tag for nothing.

Of course chain building makes the whole selling process very fragile and this is why so many house sales fall through as it only takes one person within the chain to change their mind. Think about it. On the day of completion the agent gets literally tens of thousands of pounds in fees from everyone in the chain and not just one.

Although there is much, much more that homeowners need to know about what goes on within the industry, we hope this information has been of some help to you in deciding which agent you will select to market your property. 

Successfully selling your property with Red Homes
The Red Homes code of practice is to charge all homeowners the same %. We have a transparent fee structure for all to see. All homeowners pay the same percentage fee regardless of the value, size, condition and location of their property because that’s fair, that’s right and that’s ethical.

We (the Bracknell branch) have successfully sold over 500 properties of all types in Bracknell, Binfield, Warfield, Winkfield, Ascot, Wokingham, Finchampstead, Crowthorne, Sandhurst, Aldershot, Reading, Winnersh and other locations. We have saved hundreds of thousands of pounds for our vendors. They decided correctly, that rather than waste thousands of pounds by giving it to another agent, they could sell with us and have much more money left on completion to spend on something benefitting them and not another the agent. It’s common sense really isn’t it?

Features and benefits of selling with Red Homes.

• A traditional service combined with the latest internet technology.
• An unbeatable and totally transparent local selling fee.
• A flexible selling agreement
• Available to contact 7 days a week, including evenings.
• Internet advertising with ‘Rightmove’ the U.K.’s No.1 internet property site and other portals.
• Additional advertising on our own website www.redhomes.co.uk
• Secure accompanied viewings.
• Viewing feedback within 24 hours
• Testimonials and recommendations from satisfied customers.
• Independent mortgage advice, conveyancing and EPC service.
• Regular constructive feedback both positive and negative (if required).
• Members of The Ombudsman for Estate Agents
• Office of Fair Trading Approved: Ethical Code of Practice.