GRcade

Anyone had any experience using Purple Bricks to sell a house?

We're looking at moving soon and have heard that they are a good shout if you want to minimise some of the fees that would normally go to the estate agents?

Quick, somebody change the thread title!

Jenuall wrote:Anyone had any experience using Purple Bricks to sell a house?

We're looking at moving soon and have heard that they are a good shout if you want to minimise some of the fees that would normally go to the estate agents?

We used them and would recommend. You need to pay the one off fee up front though (£900?) and it is non refundable if the house doesn't sell.

I think there's a few who do the same thing now so probably worth ringing around.

Dual wrote:

Jenuall wrote:Anyone had any experience using Purple Bricks to sell a house?

We're looking at moving soon and have heard that they are a good shout if you want to minimise some of the fees that would normally go to the estate agents?

We used them and would recommend. You need to pay the one off fee up front though (£900?) and it is non refundable if the house doesn't sell.

I think there's a few who do the same thing now so probably worth ringing around.

Cheers, I'll have a look and see what others might do as well.

I guess their quality may vary regionally - presumably they use people with local knowledge rather than having a national team of estate agents?

Jenuall wrote:

Dual wrote:

Jenuall wrote:Anyone had any experience using Purple Bricks to sell a house?

We're looking at moving soon and have heard that they are a good shout if you want to minimise some of the fees that would normally go to the estate agents?

We used them and would recommend. You need to pay the one off fee up front though (£900?) and it is non refundable if the house doesn't sell.

I think there's a few who do the same thing now so probably worth ringing around.

Cheers, I'll have a look and see what others might do as well.

I guess their quality may vary regionally - presumably they use people with local knowledge rather than having a national team of estate agents?

Yeah you'll get your local guy come out who will have a folder with market research etc they'll take the photos, do a floor plan and write the advert. They send it all over to you and if you're happy you pay the fee and it goes live.

You then have to manage all of the viewings. Including showing the perspective buyers around the property. That's the part that puts some people off but I didn't mind doing it.

Okay thanks for the info Dual.

Managing our own viewings may well be the tricky part, I can see why that would be the deal breaker for many. But hey - if it saves some money then we might be able to work something out!

Jenuall wrote:Okay thanks for the info Dual.

Managing our own viewings may well be the tricky part, I can see why that would be the deal breaker for many. But hey - if it saves some money then we might be able to work something out!

No problem.

Re viewings:

They do make it easy in the way of a web portal or phone app. You essentially have a calendar where you enter all the times you're available for viewings (say weekday evenings after 6pm and any time on weekends for example) and then the perspective viewer has to book in against your availability. You get a text if someone books and can cancel at any time. It worked quite well I found.

Just a pain in the arse having to move the dead bodies in and out of the garage

Preezy wrote:Just a pain in the arse having to move the dead bodies in and out of the garage

These things do take time!

Dual wrote:They do make it easy in the way of a web portal or phone app. You essentially have a calendar where you enter all the times you're available for viewings (say weekday evenings after 6pm and any time on weekends for example) and then the perspective viewer has to book in against your availability. You get a text if someone books and can cancel at any time. It worked quite well I found.

Thanks again for the info Dual - that does sound like it's a pretty handy way of doing things, I'll run it past the wife and see if we think we can manage viewings ourselves!

Dual wrote:They do make it easy in the way of a web portal or phone app. You essentially have a calendar where you enter all the times you're available for viewings (say weekday evenings after 6pm and any time on weekends for example) and then the perspective viewer has to book in against your availability. You get a text if someone books and can cancel at any time. It worked quite well I found.

This app sounds like a great way of casing a house

fwiw my friends mum sold a place for around 600k with purple bricks, it was on the market for a while but they are pretty smart people and I imagine they were happy saving money over the sale proceeds. It's still STC though.

It's one of those things of those things where you don't know how good it will be until after the fact. I play golf wth a guy who had his house on the market for 4 days so paid a small fortune for someone to take a few pictures and put them on the internet. I on the other hand had a buyer pull out on the day of exchanging contracts but the estate agent pulled out all the stops to try and get another sale over the weekend which they did to save the purchase of our dream house. I got my money's worth and then some.

Landlord was supposed to send a painter around, which was arranged with the painter, but instead we got his son for some reason. Now the landlord is a popular science author, a doctorate, with many books on global warming, and the landlady is a chemist. So you might assume this is a skeptical, science thinking family. Turns out this guy who I probably shouldn't have gotten into a conversation with is the total opposite (like father like son, erm nope). He calls Trump (he proudly owns a MAGA hat, it's one of his favourite possessions) "God Emporer Trump" and believes he should be cast in gold, and is a bonafide genius, one of the greatest people ever. He hangs a Kekistan flag in his house, believes global warming is made up to charge people more money for green fuel and doesn't like the diverse characters in Destiny (which he's played for 3000 hours) because they are "just ugly"; he's very unhappy about identity politics in games. He claimed to be a white nationalist (I'm not sure what prompted this) but quickly backtracked to nationalist. And his home and his friends are on 4ch*n (he doesn't like the weekends and laments the fact it's Friday because his friends are going to ask him to go out). Before leaving he stated that "when the revolution comes I'll be the first to shoot" and then something about how the world will be better etc. on the way out.

Apparently he lives next door to the local labour representative and frequently yells at him at every opportunity, I mentioned that might be harassment, he said "no I can, he's my neighbour". OK.

Managed to find some middle ground as low income folk (he's on 9k) and I was extremely careful what I said, I can understand the anarchism and nihilism of the chans and free speech etc but I honestly feel sorry for this guy living in Brighton as he hates progressives, hates socialism (equating it to communism and it will never work etc, trying to turn the UK socialist etc), and in general must be incredibly isolated. With reference to normies etc, and apparently born socially inept (so probably autistic), it was bewildering and eye opening at the same time, in such a short space of time. I'm well known for getting on with virtually anyone despite what they say or their appearances, but that was hard even for me. I'm surprised he must have been bright enough to avoid saying anything obviously illegal. He loved my models and games though and smiled and wished me a good day on the way out. How very strange. Just for context, I suppose I don't mix an awful lot, but in this area full of academics and socialists etc and at arts university for a few years, I'm probably sheltered from all of these views and it's kind of amazing because I've never met more than a few people with views like that so its not something I generally expect. I only really see these things on the Internet in newspaper comments and on Facebook. I am almost feel kind of guilty with my ability to talk automatically and generate conversation, unguarded, even with total strangers, to elicit such forthcoming and controversial views, it's kind of tragic and a credit to me.

I could go on but I might to have to keep an eye on this guy! Hopefully the hateful rhetoric is just that and he fixes the handrail on OK without flying off the handle (he spoke of how short his fuse is and he's into martial arts;- in a room full of highly strung people he is probably the most likely to kick off). I might regret the decision to hand over my contact details to the landlord to send their own contractors instead of the agents.

Anyway this might be the last you hear of me as he's back sometime this weekend or Monday, I don't know.

They're actually selling those MAGA red caps in Poundland. For months now I've wondered who on earth is buying them and now I guess I have the answer!

He sounds incredibly impressionable considering you just described an internet caricature. If it helps I don't think you're missing out on these people because of a social bubble, I think they're actually quite rare.

Be politely distant until the job is done, just like when dealing with taxi drivers.

It highlighted for me that people with poor circumstances and isolated in different ways, are probably more likely to have, even when they directly contradict their needs and harm them (for example socialism is good for people on low incomes, free healthcare, state benefits etc), the more extreme authoritarian and fascist ideas and reject debates like equality and identity politics. Even when they are brought up by the highest level of education in science. Truly a case of the enemy that is not there, at least in my opinion. Views schmews.

Bizarre.

OrangeRakoon wrote:He sounds incredibly impressionable considering you just described an internet caricature. If it helps I don't think you're missing out on these people because of a social bubble, I think they're actually quite rare.

Be politely distant until the job is done, just like when dealing with taxi drivers.

That's an interesting comparison now you mention it. Once I was in a taxi with a mate, the driver blared out Final Countdown for half the journey, while pointing at fat people and shouting, "look, there's another one! Look at all these biffas! Eh? Eh? If you screwed one of them, sausages would come out the other end! Ha! HAHA!" ... We felt like that scene with the football guys in IT Crowd.

Hopefully he shows up after my partner is home so she can humour him and I'll just stay glued to the sofa while my back is strawberry floated anyway.

Bunni wrote:Looking to buy once I've settled into my new work contract, probably around a year from now. What should we be doing in the mean time? We've got some deposit and I'll be opening a help to buy ISA in the summer once were back from Japan (currently saving for that) and be saving regularly into that.

Deposit is easy enough to work out, but how much should we be putting aside for duty, fees and all that legal jazz?

You buying in Glasgow? The market there seems to be booming for buyers, estate agents won’t leave me alone.

Edinburgh's still proving to be a strawberry floating nightmare, went 44% (!) over the home report on one property and still got outbid

Green Gecko wrote:That's an interesting comparison now you mention it. Once I was in a taxi with a mate, the driver blared out Final Countdown for half the journey, while pointing at fat people and shouting, "look, there's another one! Look at all these biffas! Eh? Eh? If you screwed one of them, sausages would come out the other end! Ha! HAHA!" ... We felt like that scene with the football guys in IT Crowd.

What the strawberry float?

This 100% true encounter rates pretty highly as one of the most awkward moments in my life, alongside my grandad blurting out that he "knew about the mushrooms by the way", while I sat with my dad, brothers and granny in their later days.

(My stunned father evidently thought he had gotten away with wild nights in the forest with his best mate all those years ago. Not that this was news, once I started complaining that everyone was high smoking "happy grass" at his 50th birthday party, they shut me up by feeding me ice cream, a bribe I was willing to accept.)

Maybe it's time to start writing a biography?