Sara

Aug 5, 2018

Shocking!!

I have recently advertised and hopefully sold my house with the Doncaster branch. I have experienced many difficulties and examples of a very poor organisation that I would like to bring to your attention. Due to the volume of concerns, I feel it best to bullet point them as a list. - When arranging a the valuation with Whitegates, I had requested that all contact be made with me via email. This is my personal preference of communication. Whitegates insisted on having a mobile number so I provided that of my boyfriends. He has no financial commitment to my house. He was contacted to organise the Valuation but was told that he would receive a phonecall to confirm the appointment. He did not receive this call so being the organised professionals that we are, we called your office to confirm. -Whitegates then sent my contacts to the wrong email address. I again chased this up. - When I signed the contracts via email, these were sent back to the address that I received them from. I did not hear anything about these contracts until I again contacted the office 4 days later. Hayley told me that she had not received the contract and asked me to email them directly to her. Again I did as requested but still did not hear anything from her. Again when I chased this up, this time putting in writing that I wanted to terminate any contract I had, Hayley then told me that she did in fact have the contracts but didn't realised. Eventually the house was on the market. - Next we get to the viewings. Despite a member of the team speaking to me several times on Friday to arrange a viewing for the following Tuesday (something I could not accommodate) the team decided to call the bf on the same day, whilst he was at work, to ask if he could accommodate the viewing of house. I can assure you that if either of us where able to accommodate a viewing then I would have informed them accordingly. - Now, on Saturday afternoon, I looked at our 'Portal' and noticed that a viewing had been arranged for Monday. Neither the bf or I are aware of this viewing and neither of us can accommodate it. I submitted an email through the Portal to raise this concern on Saturday afternoon. It is now Sunday evening and I have still not heard anything about the viewing tomorrow. I have spoken to a member of the team via your online 'chat' but Felicity was not able to help me and appeared to be more interested in selling me a property then helping me resolve this issue. I have also text and emailed Hayley asking for advise and support but it appears that she is out of the office until the 20th Aug. I therefore forwarded my email into your branch. Tomorrow I leave for work at 7:30. If there is a viewing then noone will be able to access the property as they do not have a key and even if you could, there will be a dog in the property as I have not arranged for her to be elsewhere. As I am sure you can tell from the above, it has not been a smooth experience with the Doncaster Branch. It is clear that the blame does not lie with a single person but unfortunately with what appears to be a very unorganised team of staff. If I did not think that my house will be very quick to sell, I would be using my 14 day 'cooling off' period and terminating my contract with the firm. I will not use them again and I would not recommend them to anyone. 28th Aug. Thank you for your response Whitegates but I worry that there has AGAIN been a miscommunication as my house did not sell on the second viewing as you have suggested in your reply. It did sell quickly but naturally you will understand that this is largely in part to the actual house and how it is presented. It may be worth a note, in case you want to speak to the office further that after the property was sold, I was copied in to an email to Whitegates from another estate agents complaining that they had been trying to contact the Doncaster branch several times for a few days without any success. This slowed the process of our sale and purchase. I have just counted the number of viewings we had and it was 9 in total. Perhaps Doncaster Whitegates has got our case mixed up with another house/family that had experienced difficulties.