Day off and the Estate Agents of Doom!

Hands up who else thinks that estate agents are gits?

Yesterday was my day off and Kat & I had arranged to view a couple of flats through Tenant Link. We were supposed to view four different properties, and they even called early in the morning to confirm our appointment. So we get to their office ready to be taken to the properties and what do they tell us? One property has been let. And the others are “not suitable” for us because we’re looking to move in June and the properties are available now.

WHAT!?

Ok, so you overlook these things when making appointments? You don’t think to tell us this information before? You still call us to make sure we’re coming, then tell us we came for nothing!? Frickin’ idiots.

So, we left their offices without being offered any other property. We got the distinct impression they didn’t want our business. So we crossed them off our list and won’t be going back to them.

Seeing as we made the effort to go into town we then decide to look at a few other estate agents on the same street, to see if we can’t salvage something from our day. Our first stop was Your Move. They tried to get our interest in a few things outside our price range, despite us telling them what we could afford just minutes before. Then they gave us a list of properties and told us to go away and look at it. We left and decided we may come back to them, depending on what we find elsewhere.

Our next stop was Fox & Sons. We saw three places in the window that were in our price range and that looked good so we popped in to find out more about them. They showed us details for one of them and arranged for us to have a look at it later in the day. They said there had been a lot of interest in it and that we would have to move quickly once we saw it if we were interested. They then seemed very unconcerned in showing us anything about the other properties we mentioned and we left being a bit confused.

We had a spot of lunch and went to the cinema to see Coraline, which is pretty good by the way, to waste some time before our appointment at 5.15pm. We got to the property a little early, just as Kat gets a call to say that it’s been let. I have to admit, we kind of saw this coming.

Fortunately we had also visited The Flat Agency before lunch. The guy we spoke to in there was so different to the others it was untrue. He was friendly, helpful and arranged five places for us to look at on Saturday. He told us which landlords would be willing to wait for us to move in and which would be willing to negotiate on the rent. If the other estate agents had dented our belief and left us feeling a little defeated then this one man had restored our faith that we would be able to find something.

We can only hope that Saturday is a much more productive day.