Samantha Withers, from Attik Property Services, discusses her own stressful moving experience.
In what can be quite a stressful process of buying and selling houses, I feel it's the little elements of good customer service that can make a difference between a good agent and a bad one.
They say you get what you pay for, and using cheaper options to sell property can be a perfect example of this. So why are some vendors still choosing the cheap option, when trying to sell their biggest asset?
It's been four days since I completed and moved into my new home in the countryside, the move went fairly smoothly, with only one broken plant pot (that we know of) but there was something missing from my recent house buying process.
As I said it's been nearly a week since I completed, and yet I'm still waiting for that congratulatory call from the vendor's estate agents to say that I could collect the keys to my new home.
The estate agent shall remain anonymous.
However, sitting in the back of a removals van, clock ticking, I thought that it was time to maybe chase things up a little which resulted in working my way through an automated system to get through to somebody in a call centre, who didn't know who I was and didn't appear to know what I was talking about.
After being put on hold for a good length of time I was then told that they would get back to me.
Guess what? I'm still waiting for that call back.
From the point of having my offer accepted on the digital app it became apparent that the agent concerned was none existent from the point of a sale being agreed, and they relied on the other estate agents in the chain to push the sale through.
I only heard from them once at the beginning, other than that no one checked my financial credibility, my identification or that I had instructed solicitors, all key elements to agreeing a sale that maybe our customers at Attik take for granted.
At Attik Property Services the whole team are dedicated in making sure that the sales go through to completion.
You hear it a lot that 'a house will sell itself', albeit that some aspects of that statement are true, the selling of the property is only the tip of the property iceberg in comparison to what most of we high street agents do behind the scenes after the offer has been accepted.
In my opinion I feel traditional 'high street' estate agents, like us at Attik, should just sit tight and continue to do what we do best and actually talk to our customers and give a great customer service.
You can contact Samantha Withers, at Attik Property Services, column sponsors, on 01362 694800.
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