Estate Agent fees in London

[anonymous-user]

Hello all,

Very grateful for your advice and experience on this one. We are selling our three bedroom maisonette in SE London and possibly going ahead with KFH. Thing is, they say they always charge a flat fee for flats, and it is 1.35% (discounted!) for us which is about £4440 inc vat.

That seems a lot for a beautifully presented house in a high demand street that will pretty much sell itself... am i way out? Is this a reasonable fee? Any other advice on this? We want to get a realistic price, fairly quickly by the way.

Thanks!

[thegman]

We paid KFH 1.25 last June. No idea where rates are at now. There are lots of threads on here about negotiating and choosing an agent

[blindswelledrat]

Sounds fairly reasonable.
Easy eough to test the theory though. If the house is as easy to sell as you siggest- simply go call all the other local agents, tell them you have had this offer from the other ones andsee whether they can better it.
The best test of 'reasonable' is market forces and you know if all the other estate agents will only do it for similar, then its reasonable

[anonymous-user]

Thanks for your responses. That's based on their suggested price and belief they can achieve it, they're exactly the same sale figure as one other agent. Wasn't sure about the fixed rate. I think it's time to swallow the cost of moving house. I found a lot of threads on that! Thanks.

[anonymous-user]

If its so easy to sell, why not sell it without an agent using something like tepilo or one of the other self sell service?

[marky1]

If it's so easy to sell add 2k to the selling price and you are only paying 0.7%

[Brother D]

Or try halfapercent.com I used that to buy a property. Straight forward and saved the seller quite a few grand.

[Dave_ITR]

There are better rates than that to be had at the moment.

Where in SE London are you?

[Beardy10]

That's a good rate if they are a decent agent...the decent agents where I live (NW London) won't get out of bed for that unless it's either a very expensive property or an outstanding property.

[seaninog]

I have to give a mention to www.housenetwork.co.uk here. You pay a flat fee of about £500, they take photos of your house and it goes on ALL the major property websites. After that, they field the call enquiries but YOU do the viewings. When I was selling my house I was happy to do the viewings because a) I lived there and b) I knew it better than anyone. This may not suit every situation but if you're happy to do viewings and negotiations yourself, it's a far cheaper solution.

Indeed, in my opinion Estate Agents often cloud the waters and make negotiations more difficult. I'm much happier to do this myself.

Oh and I've used them for rental stuff too with excellent success.