Purple Bricks - what's the catch?

[edwalters]

We're looking to sell our property and got a valuation from Purple Bricks last week.

It was under what we'd expected, but this could purely be based on what's going on in the market at the moment.

Has anyone had experience of selling with them or know what their salespersons are incentivised by?

I thought they were paid per listing but the lower/ more cautious valuation makes me unsure that this would be the case.

[Lowlander]

Have you had any other valuations? I would get three or four valuations at the least to give you a better idea (taking into account that Foxtons will overvalue).

It's a buyer's market and prices are down in London (see various threads on here). Many sellers are being surprised.

[Sue]

I don't know anything about Purple Bricks, but have you tried googling Purple Bricks reviews?

[Mick Mac]

Id use an agent. Not buying into the purple bricks thing myself. There isnt a right price, the agent works for you and should create some added value.

[L16579]

Just be aware they don?t offer the traditional estate agent service and you won?t necessarily get as many viewings as you would from a normal estate agent.

[malumbu]

I expect that the Estate Agents market is inefficient with unnecessarily high overheads. In this digital world perhaps it is fairly time limited. Does anyone feel sorry for estate agents? You'll no doubt get others entering the market if Purple Bricks is a shoddy outfit. Pretty high scoring on Trustpilot with 52,000 reviews - can't be a conspiracy

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/purplebricks.co.uk

[DuncanW]

I have bought a property through PurpleBricks earlier this year and certainly from our side of the transaction, the service was very good.

Apart from not having a local branch, they did act much like a normal agent. They were present when we viewed the property and the individual we met knew the house well and was able to answer questions about the property, etc. Once the offer was in, the person who saw it through was very efficient. More so than other agents we have used and more helpful than our conveyancer.

[Mick Mac]

Their TrustPilot is impressive, but to put it in perspective, Foxtons is too: TrustScore 8.9 out of 10

[Mick Mac]

The catch is presumably that you pay up front, or at least contract to pay. And I don't think you get it back if you change agents or take the property off the market.

[SpringTime]

You do indeed lay down a non-refundable fee from the off, so if the property fails to sell PB are still quids in. I'd be wary of "local experts" who cover enormous areas and can't possibly know about new local restaurants, schools, transport links, parks, parking, clay soil, the Diverter, the best/worst pubs, or the new slides at Peckham Rye. Do you they really help you progress your sale? Do they have full chain details to hand to give to related agents in a chain when you have agreed sale and purchase? And as to their online reviews I wouldn't trust them - heard too much bad news. No to PB from me, rather fork out a higher fee on a conventional agent whose staff are incentivised by that fee to secure best price, and if they don't or if you decide not to move then there's no fee applicable.

[Henry_17]

Springtime,

Why do you say a traditional agent is incentivised to get the best price? That would only be true when there is a high probability that a sale is going to go through, in which case they can afford to be greedy and push for a higher price / commission for them. Arguably that is applicable in a housing bull market. But that is not the case in the current market of sharply fallen transaction volume and accelerated declining transaction prices (specifically for se22). In this environment the agent cares far more about just earning a fee at all i.e. getting a sale done, which means a more attractive price for the buyer / lower price for the seller.

[KidKruger]

is it possible to advertise on Rightmove without being an agent (i.e. privately) ?

[Mick Mac]

Henry_17 Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Why do you say a traditional agent is incentivised

> to get the best price?

>In this environment the agent cares far more about just earning a fee at all i.e. getting a sale done, which means a >more attractive price for the buyer / lower price for the seller.

Surely that's the Purple Brick's model. We sell for a fixed fee, we get the same fee iresspective of price.

> Why do you say a traditional agent is incentivised

> to get the best price?

Because they earn a bigger fee on a higher price (of course...) And they dont earn anything if they dont sell. At the end of the day the seller can walk away from a traditional agent at any time, for free, the agent therefore has to evidence to the seller that he/she is getting the highest possible price.

For me there are far too many people on the PB reviews saying, "PB sold my house in 5 days....", well sorry but thats generally insufficient time to create sufficient interest in the property / have a number of intereated parties / negotiate with the buyer / and if more than one buyer have some competitive tension etc.

[alex_b]

Mick Mac Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Because they earn a bigger fee on a higher price

> (of course...) And they dont earn anything if they

> dont sell.

To an extent, but they also get paid more for shifting more properties at a non optimal price than they do selling fewer at the absolute best price.

If they add ?50k to the selling price, then their company gets an extra ?500-?1000 and they perhaps an extra ?50? If that takes them an extra 5 viewings to achieve then do you think they'll really bother? Or will they use that time to sell another property?

> At the end of the day the seller can

> walk away from a traditional agent at any time,

> for free, the agent therefore has to evidence to

> the seller that he/she is getting the highest

> possible price.

Maybe, maybe not. A seller is more likely to walk away if a property hasn't been offered on then if they have a bunch of offers at a lower price.

> For me there are far too many people on the PB

> reviews saying, "PB sold my house in 5 days....",

> well sorry but thats generally insufficient time

> to create sufficient interest in the property /

> have a number of intereated parties / negotiate

> with the buyer / and if more than one buyer have

> some competitive tension etc.

Isn't that about having a good book of customers that you can market to immediately? Isn't there also a perception that if a property has been on the market for a while then it's overpriced and more open to lower offers?

[Mick Mac]

What I thought we were doing here alex_b is not stating what we already know about estate agents, but what makes their offering different from Purple Bricks.

You are focussing on why the traditional estate agent model might not work as well as its supposed to, we all know that, but its still different from Purple Bricks fixed fee, pay up front, no sale you still pay us

With an established agent, the seller (customer) has a certain amount of control, and what he gets from the agent depends to some extent on how he excercises that control.

There is no such control with PB.

[alex_b]

Yes, but if the argument is that traditional agents are better because they are incentivised to achieve better prices it's worth considering if that is actually true (I don't think it is).

Purple Bricks seems to be mostly selling on price and price transparency. Personally I think both of these are good things. I'm also unconvinced by the "no-win no fee" model of many parts of the housing market (agents, conveyencers, etc); it tends to be an excuse to charge a premium to worried customers in exchange for (often illusory) flexibility.

[Dulwichgirl82]

we sold with them late last year, the market was a little different then though, and our was probably an easyish sell. i found them fine, not amazing, but house was on rightmove (which I'm pretty sure where everyone looks anyway nowadays) and sold in a few weeks. post sale care felt fairly standard. we did get a few valuations and were happy with the price we got.

regarding local knowledge, i actually found when we viewed houses(and there were a lot) with traditional agents, the majority didn't know much about the areas, schools etc, beyond what rightmove told us, and we often knew more having researched them. i know that may vary from agent to agent.

we did save ourselves quite a few thousand pounds in the end so overall worked for us.

on a side note, regarding getting the best price,an estate agent friend of mine says its best for them to get more sales for less, than push for higher prices, as they make more that way overall.

[Dopamine1979]

We tried with Purple Bricks last year. Had 2 viewings in 6 months. Then went with a traditional agent and had 10+ viewings within 2 months and sold the property.

The main difference we found is that traditional agents have a strong incentive to get the punters in and earn their commission. They will therefore ring around and try and get the viewings. Whereas purple bricks didn't really do much hustling on our behalf as they already had our money.