Estate agency experience: Winkworths ED = Yes, Winkworths FH = No

[alieh]

After a long and protracted selling and buying experience, I thought I would share our experience in case it is useful.

We sold through Winkworths East Dulwich (this is the second house we've sold through them). Excellent. Can't fault them. Our first sale fell through and they found another buyer super quickly and were very responsive through (that is our experience on the sellers side anyway!).

We have then been trying to buy a house listed with Winkworths Forest Hill. Absolute nightmare. The sale almost fell through multiple times in part because of lack of communications and follow through from the agent. We had to take over chasing the other agents in the chain and calling every day to push things along (this was after it took almost 6 months from our offer being accepted to exchange of contracts) and had to just start dealing directly with the vendor. We would leave messages at the office and never get a call back. I think the best part was when I got a call from someone junior within the office after about 4 months of waiting for exchange of contracts asking for an update on how my property search was going...."Why don't you tell me since I've been waiting 4 months to buy a property through you???".

Winkworths ED = recommended.

Winkworths Forest Hill = avoid.

In my experience.