Haart on LL

[safesurfer]

i'm sure someone else on this list has already pointed out that if you ask 100 people their opinion of local estate agents you will get 100 different answers, it's futile.

[kford]

Haart - bad experience. Too flash and selly, even for estate agents.

[tommy]

We bought through Roy Brooks - we had a good service and they seemed to know the local area well, they also kept following up with the solicitors on both sides. Recommended

[barrymarshall]

My (now ex-) girlfriend and I went to a few estate agents over a year ago when we were looking to move to ED. Haart were pretty poor and unenthusiastic. We said we'd only got a grand per month budget for rentals and we didn't get anything from them. Winkworth were even more dismissive.

Definitely try Acorn - they were not only helpful and encouraging, they had loads of properties on their books, one of which I am still living in.

Only treouble with them was thay we had to go all the way over to Ladywell on moving day to pick up the keys to the place, adding an extra two hours to our day - grrrr!

[macroban]

I read that Spicerhaart have now started their cull and are closing underperforming branches.

[Shaggy]

Have dealt whith most of the EE's on Lordship Lane recently but Haart -- thats because they never seem to return phone calls. Once they agreed to take me to a property and then asked to reschedule at the last moment when I had left work early and run back from town. They said they had been ``too busy'' to call the owner.

The house I wanted to see looked pretty good on paper for the needs of me and Mrs Shaggy. However it took them more than two months to sell after they had messed with my shedule, and it had already been reduced because it was hanging around on the market. Maybe if they actually showed houses they would have a better chance....

Ive found Bushells and Waites to be really helpful and professional.

Maybe we should start a sweepstake on which will be the first EE to move off the lane.

[shorri]

We bought my house through Haart and whilst we were delighted to land the one we got, they behaved pretty terribly. There was a feverish bidding war and Haart came to us asking for our "best and final offer" stating that the vendor didn't want to go to sealed bids. Two days later we got a call saying that it was going to sealed bids after all and what did we want to bid?! I.e. what was our "final final offer". Shameless. I was livid but such was the heat in the market and our desire to move we went for it anyway. Maybe it's too much to ask an estate agent to marshall their buyers but there should be a code of conduct.

To cap it all, we had to wait 6 hours on moving day (on the pavement on LL) to get the keys. In the end, sick of waiting for them to call us (we had been phoning them all day to check progress) my fiancee went into the office to see what was going on only to find that the keys were there and had been for at least an hour!

I'm not sure Haart is any worse than any of the others though - my experience over the years is that estate agents, as a rule, live up to their image: incompetent and unscrupulous!

[ratty]

Haart made us go to best and final too!

[smith]

PropertyIn.com... estate agents with integrity! Highly recommended.

[shorri]

Yeah but Ratty, did they make you go to best and final TWICE! Once is fair enough, but it has to be the end of the story. Totally unacceptable is to realise that there are lots of high offers and that some more cash can be squeezed i.e. go back for another round of offers accepting that say from eight, four will pull out in disgust but the rest are sufficiently emotionally involved to bid even higher... Poor form really

[ratty]

Nope not twice! The cheeky monkeys.

In fact, when we bought our mansion through them (ok 2 bed on Abbotswood) I found them, or more specifically the french lady that worked there, to be excellent!

[STEVEN]

I used Harrt when they first started and had such a bad experience that I will never use the again. They took over a local agent through which I was renting a property I owned whilst abroad. They cost me thousands of pounds in repairs that I had to do to the property before I could sell it.

The owner of the company took no responsibility for how the tenants had left the property

[grandpafred]

With that sort of service - don't use them!!!!

[macroban]

Does anyone know details of the deal Spicerhaart are said to be doing with Tesco?

Will we have a Tesco branded estate agent on Lordship Lane?

[Customer Relations]

Hi.

I have read the comments about 'best and final' offers with interest and hope I can shed some light. Any EA can ask an applicant to go to 'best and final' offers but this will be on the instruction of the Vendor. I don't know your specific details, but usually this happens when the property is a repossession with lots of interested parties, and the Vendor (Lender) is trying to attain the best price for his ex-borrower. This practice is not suggested by the EA, but instructed by the Vendor. I hope this has clarified the situation but please do contact me directly if you would like to discuss any particular case- my email address is [email protected]

Thanks

Melanie Smith

Customer Relations Manager

haart

[Knomester]

We had good service from Haart when we were looking to buy until it came to the offer stage - we put in an offer for the full asking price for a quick purchase only for Haart to come back and say they'd advised the seller to keep it on the market to see if they could do better than the asking price. It eventually went the same way as some others have mentioned (e.g. ziggy) with us being told we were bidding against another bidder... Thankfully we eventually backed out before we paid over the odds for the house in question.

We eventually bought through Roy Brooks and, like Tommy, I can not recommend them more highly (from a purchaser's point of view). Very professional and 'by the book'. Kept us up to date constantly.

I wasn't keen on any of the others we looked through including Bushells (everything was ?100k over budget), DVR (unprofessional), etc...

[Jamma]

Funny, when we bought through Haart it went to sealed bids too. Seems to be something of a pattern here...