Over the next few months I’m hopeful of embarking on purchasing my first home and given I talk about the process every day I thought I’d share my own personal experiences of the journey and try and put them into some context.
I dabbled a bit last Summer but the rates and offers for a FTB got a bit tough so I hedged my bets things would get better in the first quarter of 2021. Early stages were good, Emma Jones at Alder Rose was super helpful and they’ve stayed in touch. Once I find somewhere I like we should be able to move that relatively quickly. They had a portal where I could upload documents and we even managed a face to face which was a bit of a deal breaker for me.
On Friday I had a drive past a property I liked the look of in Chester, it’s in a really good location but there’s a question mark about parking. I say question mark, I can’t actually see where you park. It says on Rightmove it has parking as I have that selected in my search preferences. Maybe it’s round the back I thought? So today I picked the phone up to a well known agent in the town and asked the question.
Unfortunately there’s no parking other than on the road about 100 yards before hand, given the current parking debacle where I currently live (long story), this is an absolute 100% requirement. What I was amazed at was the person didn’t ask my details, take any information about what I was actually looking for, didn’t want to spend any time to add me to their buyer database or keep me in touch about properties that are coming on.
In the past I’ve been fortunate to work alongside some great estate agents in my time at Simply. Bridges down in Hampshire being one of them. I thought to myself there’s no way that Bridges would of done that. In their somewhat cockney tones they’d have been “all over it”.
So in summary early stages from an agents perspective haven’t been great, none of the agents i viewed with last summer have stayed in touch either which I’ve found interesting. I wonder whether it’s a case of them being so busy they just don’t have the time or resources to do this.
What should good look like here?
