Here's another reason to get your ducks in a row before hitting the market with your property. The process might be an arduous one, but the people helping you sell your home apparently have a very short attention span.
A new survey suggests estate agents lose interest after just two weeks if a property hasn't received any offers in that time. Bad news for people in Nine Elms, where a third of homes have been on the market for more than a year, or other parts of London, where sales are much slower than the national average.
A poll of more than 2,000 sellers in the UK found that half the time interest "dropped off considerably" after 14 days of being on the market. By the second week, the vendor was having to chase the estate agent for updates and after that it got even worse.
More than half (51 per cent) of those polled by HouseSimple.com said they were asked to drop the price of the property, and more than a fifth (21 per cent) said at least half of the viewings were with "time-wasters" who had no intention of making an offer.
It was particularly bad in London and Wales, where the number rose to four out of 10 sellers.
More than a quarter of sellers (27 per cent) said that their estate agent only secured one offer for their property.
By the end of the process, four out of 10 people (42 per cent) said they didn’t think the estate agent was worth the fees they paid, and almost three out of 10 (28 per cent) didn’t think their agent tried hard enough to sell their property.