posted 17 May 2005 12:34 PM
Hello we are about to sell our property (all going well) via Haart estate agents. On signing the contract agreement we were told that commission is based on the price of the property.Be warned this commission fee is not based as a percentage of the sale price but the original price as advice by Haart ie if they suggest a price of £105K and you sell for £99K or lower as we did the commission fee stays the at the same amount. This was not made clear to us before signing the contract. It is also not clear on the contract.
You could sell a property for £80K or less and still end up paying £2500+ commission - work out the percentage on that!
Selling is therefore a risk with Haart as they have no insentive to sell at the best price as they recieve the highest agreed commission no matter how low the price of your property sells for. Having a fixed fee would benefit the seller if the price of the property increased over the original price but that is rare these days.
If we were informed of this risk by Haart we would have never have agreed to sell with them and would have sought out a seller that charged fees as a percentage of the selling price.
Haart manager claims that they are the only agent that charges a fixed fee in this way, good luck to them!