yep – if it gets close to auction time and it looks like it won’t happen – then we’ll reassess our options.
One positive from the process is it may at least reveal exactly what everyone out there is currently willing to pay.

kp, that’s exactly what we felt. Next time we will hopefully nip things in the bud as they appear – or better yet set down exactly what we will not accept in terms of service and performance. That’s where the Jenman idea of the Customer Service Guarantee appeals.

And we have just started with property. They have shot themselves in the foot and definitely won’t be handling any of our future properties/sales!

Then there’s word-of-mouth. Anyone we speak to about buying and selling R/E will not hear good words from us about this agent. Most Adelaide people who read this forum and keep their eye on property can probably work out which agent it is anyway. If it makes them ask questions before dealing with this agent then that’s at least one positive!

With advertising costs, they weren’t negotiable with the 5 agents we spoke to. But we could get them to match other agents’ commissions.

By the way, we are both young/inexperienced and this is our first home and first attempt at selling. As such, my views about the whole process are only based on this one experience – hence the request for advice.

Thanks to all of you here for your replies so far! It has given us a lot to think about and remember for next time, if there is one! I look forward to filing this away and reading it when it’s all over. (The abusive messages will be an intersting listen too).

We do keep an eye on what’s selling and how much, but we both also work full-time. That is why we employed an agent to sell our house. If we are paying the agent $5000 – $10000 to sell our house, then we expect them to be the ones doing the research and telling us what’s happening.
They have not given us any feedback from the 35+ parties who have come through the open inspections and the agent is not being active.
That is why we have stopped promotion of the property through this agent – we don’t think they can sell the house.
We are currently wondering whether to go through another agent or not.

SuperTed, now I totally understand what you’re saying and it does make sense. Now it seems like a pretty obvious tactic. Didn’t read about that one anywhere!
So when a buyer comes to them looking in the area, they could start with ours then say ‘but for another 50000 you could get a nice character bungalow/villa’.
We sort of did consider it in a way. We thought our house may be wrong for this agent’s usual buyers. But – they did sell that one down the street and it was a conventional house too, just done up a bit more. Guess we just got sucked in.

We did that. He gave us a price for ads with and without pictures/sketches. The problem came in a couple of weeks when he tried to get nearly double what he said because he now had less listings and had to cover costs for a certain amount of “space” in the paper! We argued he never told us about that and only agreed to pay the original amount each week. Every week there would be only one phone call – to get us to pay more for the week’s advertising and arrange a time for an open!

This is where we got stuck. We had read everywhere not to sign for the standard 90 days, but for some unknown reason we did! We trusted him when he said ‘dont worry we’ll sell your house’.
There was just one bad thing after another with this agent and one weekend we had enough and during a heated phone call tried to get them to end the contract but they wouldn’t and said we were signed to them for 3 months.

After our phone call, he no longer wanted to deal with us (neither did we!) but he fobbed us off onto his trainee ‘agent’ who would prefer to stay on his mobile phone during opens instead of getting feedback from people!
After about 3 or 4 opens, he told us we need to think about how low we will come down in price and that he would have this conversation as many times as he likes! We were firm with our price, but he only had one real offer to go by which was about 15% less than we would accept.

We thought we’d be right here becuase we got an independent valuation done before talking to 5 different agents. 4 of them said we’d sell at around the same price (we didn’t tell them the valuation). This agent hasn’t got an offer near what we would accept.
Also, I kept my eye on local prices every day for the past 2 years. One down the street was very similar to ours and got a price we would have accepted for ours! Also, one further down the street was actually sold for a very good price by this agent we are with – partly why we signed with them.

Currently (after 4 weekends of opens and after deciding this agent was not going to be able to get us the price we want) we have stopped all advertising including internet and the signboard. Trying to minimise the ‘damage’ and ‘overexposure’ this agent has caused.
If by some miracle someone who has seen the house makes an acceptable offer before the contract runs out – they will get their commission – but they don’t deserve it!

Thanks alf – you have an email.

I agree. Will be interesting to see if there is the usual spring/summer upturn or not this end of year.
We are looking at trying an auction in about a month and a half. Are they bad or does it really depend on the property?

Anyone else got comments/experiences with Jenman agents?

Thanks for your replies – much appreciated!

So, really this 6 year rule would be of use if we were to rent a place ourselves and keep the old place as an IP.

OK – this is what we are trying to do ATM.

Do you mean if we DO rent it out? We would be able to reduce the ‘taxable capital gain’ by all these expenses.

Thanks Julia – yes you are a champ – I will definitely take a look at that booklet.