The business of ethics...and sharp practice

At Valencia Property we really pride ourselves on good service to the customer and an excellent after sales service. We have been here longer than any of our direct competitors and we think we have sold more houses and have more happy clients than anyone else too. We are crystal clear about our pricing and who pays what. So we were very surprised to hear this story about one of our competitors - actually ex-customers of ours - this week, as we thought that they had totally copied our business model.

We have a client who bought a small house from us two years ago and is now upgrading to a bigger place and selling the old one. He is buying the new one from us but unfortunately, from our point of view, another agent sold his current house. When he was presented with the sales contract yesterday he was surprised to see that the buyer would pay 2.5% but he would pay 2.5% too. Now he hadn’t agreed to this when he put his house with the agent and he had been specifically told that they didn’t charge him anything. So he told them to take a hike, risking losing his sale of course. They tried to justify themselves by saying we can do this because we give the best service in the area (we are told that he told them in no uncertain terms that that is rubbish but what the hey!) Anyway, they eventually dropped the charge and settled for the buyer paying their part. Valencia Property never charges the seller anything, never adds a penny to the price the seller wants, and therefore we always have the house cheaper.

We think that it is sharp practice and quite immoral to try and squeeze what amounts to a hefty sum based on the sale price of a house because you might be able to get away with it, but we don’t name names. Let people decide themselves which agents give a good service. We don’t badmouth other agents when taking people round and we give the best service in the local area without exception in our opinion and also the opinion of the vast majority of our clients. Come and try for yourselves and look at our site valencia-property.com