TLDR: Over promised and under delivered.
We decided to put our house on the market nearly six months ago after feeling reassured by Aaron and his valuation.
Aaron mentioned that this standard of property in the area we live in was extremely likely to sell quickly. Given that both mine and my partner’s work schedules are demanding, this is precisely what we wanted to do as the ONLY reason we wanted to sell was because we were very interested in another property being sold by Knightsbridge.
Aaron recommended that in order to sell quickly, we should drop our asking price slightly and suggested we opt for their more premium listing as this would give us a boost with more comprehensive marketing in their newsletters etc. Based on the confidence he gave us, we recommended Knightsbridge to someone else we know who wanted to sell their property.
For the first couple of weeks we were comfortable with our listing and the regular updates, our only issue was that no one person seemed to be assigned to ‘manage our account’ and we did have some issues with communication. Sometimes we had several people contact us about the same thing, or when we contacted Knightsbridge, our messages weren’t always relayed. We put this down to the fact that they were extremely busy because of the demand during lockdown, so could give them the benefit of the doubt.
Initially there was some interest in viewings, but that was because we were a new listing on rightmove and not to do with the fact that we ever featured in their newsletter or additional marketing - as this has still never happened.
Although when Jessica became our primary contact things did become a bit more organised, it took repeated attempts from my partner and myself to get Knightsbridge to understand that they should contact me instead of my partner during working hours. We’ve also run into a lot of confusion due to conflicting messages from multiple people, viewing appointments and updates in the months since. We’ve had many instances where we’ve been contacted by different people at Knightsbridge to book a couple of viewings in and it transpires it’s the same person they’re trying to book. We feel that their internal communication isn’t great and there’s a general lack a lot of clarity on what’s actually going on.
The view of the person we’d recommended Knightsbridge to after Aaron’s valuation also expressed the same concerns saying that “there’s too many of them working there and they either don’t speak to one another or aren’t interested in selling my property”. Given that it took 6 weeks for this person to have a For Sale sign put up, both of those statments may be correct.
Despite this, my concern is how frequently they misstated what we had discussed with them. After rejecting offers from someone who’d wanted our furniture as part of the deal and was offering 20% less than the (already lowered on Aaron’s advice) asking price, we stated that we had no intention of leaving anything as “it would cost a significant amount to replace it, and some of it is inherited and holds sentimental value”. Later down the line once we were in the process of selling to someone else and the deal fell through, we were told that our vendor asked why we didn’t accept the other lower offer and Knightsbridge explained that ‘we were sentimentally attached to our property’.
I was also told that out of our property and our vendor’s property, we were more likely to sell, but yet it is frequently implied in various ways that it was our fault our property hadn’t sold, even regarding the very low offer mentioned above, the attitude from Knightsbridge was to just accept what was an unreasonable offer and a bad deal.
Both my partner and I had spoken with Jessica and other people at Knightsbridge regarding what the lowest offer we would reasonably sell for, whilst taking into account monthly repayments on the property we’d been accepted for, without having to live beyond our means. I’m of the opinion that for us as their clients, they were happy to disregard financial responsibility in favour of a quick sale - any sale.
What was a great sales pitch has completely failed to deliver on all of the benefits it offered. They aren’t interested in marketing it or doing anything to generate more interest beyond the initial couple of weeks. Nearly 6 months later our property isn’t sold, our vendor’s property still isn’t sold, and my referral’s property hasn’t sold. I think it says it all.
