Do Online Estate Agents Actually Save You Money?
News at Waterfords | 01/10/2019
If you are thinking about selling your property, you may have noticed the influx of national marketing campaigns for online estate agents in recent years. These advertisements often promise that the seller will save thousands of pounds in commission, a tempting prospect for a homeowner. This prompted Waterfords to ask the question, does using an online only estate agent actually save you money?
Competition in the property market from the new online model is actually a positive step for all estate agents. High Street Estate Agents have been forced to keep up with consumer trends and improve their online presence, something that many businesses needed to embrace. Overall, this has improved customer service further by refining preferred customer communication methods.
At Waterfords, we have definitely embraced this change by offering our customers a variety of marketing methods to suit their property and launching a Customer Contact Centre to make sure we are readily available to help with all queries. We have launched a new website with an abundance of features to benefit both buyers and sellers, as well as upping our social media presence to market our sales and lettings properties to a much bigger buying audience.
As an established and prominent High Street Estate Agent in Camberley, Chobham, Farnham, Fleet and Yateley, we have nearly 25 years’ experience of providing outstanding customer service to vendors, landlords, buyers and tenants. Despite Waterfords being in the top ten estate agents in the UK for customer service*, we occasionally come across sellers who are considering using an online only estate agent.
It’s down to one thing: Fees. We often get asked when valuing property, “Why would we pay Waterfords to market our home, when we could save thousands of pounds with an online estate agent?”
First of all, just what is an Online Estate Agent?
‘Which?’ magazine describe them as:
“Online only estate agencies are run via websites and call centres, they tend to offer a more basic service than you would receive from a high-street agent… Online-only estate agents require the seller to do most of the work themselves, from taking photos and creating an advert to handling buyer enquiries, conducting viewings and negotiating offers.”
Using recent research by The Advisory, we are going to look at a scenario between using an Online Only Estate Agent and Waterfords. We will use an example valuation price of £500,000 in both scenarios to make a clear comparison.
