Estate agents "mystery shopping"

argentina said:
if they are not in the best position to be able to give property valuations then nobody is….
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Dr Strangelove said:
So do they really need to know how their competitors would hypothetically value a property?
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Not being involved in the sector, I don’t know precisely why they did what they did.

My point is that, as a lay person, I would take from the story that they don’t really have confidence in their own valuation abilities and that they need the reassurance of their competitors. I can’t think of any other reason why they acted the way they did. The difference between their valuation and those of their competitors would seem to suggest that their uncertainty was warranted.

I accept I may be wrong and that there was another factor at play, but if I were a potential client, that is the impression I would come away with.
 
arbitron said:
a "mystery shopper" exercise to compare competitor fees.
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Where are you getting all the stuff about their wanting to ascertain their competitors' valuations and their lack of confidence in their own?

They just wanted to find out what fees were actually being charged.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
They just wanted to find out what fees were actually being charged.
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That can be established with a phone call.

From what I read, Mullery initially defended O’Gara’s actions by saying it was part of a strategy to set a realistic guide price to encourage competitive bidding because pricing properties “is not an exact science”. He later apologised for not advising the client of what was going on.
 
My understanding is that estate agents do a lot of work pricing properties that is not related to the property going on the market. Being able to set a realistic price should be important for that.
 
The commission estate agents charge is not set in stone, they also won’t tell you over the phone what they charge. Some charge an upfront fee some also use sliding scales e.g. if a property achieves over x amount the commission changes/varies.
I would say MOG were sussing out the competition and were caught red handed. Again - hardly an immortal sin/ certainty a bit of a non story
 
Leo said:
No one was being cheated here.
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True, but isn't the key issue here that they
seem to have tried to pass themselves off as the property owner when making enquiries with the other estate agents about valuations and charges? Using personal information like that is not good manners, seems a bit dodgy and may even be a breach of GDPR?
 
ClubMan said:
True, but isn't the key issue here that they
(allegedly?) tried to pass themselves off as the property owner when making enquiries with the other estate agents about valuations and charges?
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Yeah, it's standard practice that mystery shoppers don't reveal their employment or motivation. Doing so would defeat the purpose
:). There are multiple agencies who specialise in offering mystery shopper and competition research, they always pretend to be regular shoppers when carrying out such research.

I think the only real issue is that the property owners were blindsided and unaware.
 
Dublin estate agent completed house sale without having anti-money laundering documentation on file

A prominent estate agent completed the sale of a house without having anti-money laundering documentation in place, the Irish Independent can reveal.
Estate agents are required by law to ask vendors for a copy of their ID and a utility bill showing proof of address. They must have this documentation on file before trying to sell a property on someone’s behalf.

However, Dublin firm Mullery O’Gara appears not to have done so on at least one occasion.

In 2023, partner Deirdre O’Gara contacted a former client more than a year after she sold the client’s house in south Dublin to get the necessary documentation.
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A more serious concern than the original (non-)story.
 
How is that a more serious concern? They are selling your house, via 2 sets of solicitors and loads of contracts and forms, they know who you are and where you live. Not taking a photocopy of your passport and utility bill to put in a file is meaningless, it’s an absolute non story and again you would love to know who has the pull to just get this stuff placed in a national paper as ‘news’ and a chance for most of the article to be a rehash of the original one.
 
Most EA valuations are way off the mark, whether prices are going up, stagnant, or down. It's the most subjective and most non-transparent of (so called) "professions". They mislead both sellers and buyers. The latte I feel is the worst of all. They routinely advertise properties for sale way below what the advise the seller is the AMV, In doing so, they just waste prospective buyers time viewing holes that are outside their price range. This serves nobody but them, and I don't even know what it serves them.
 
Setforlife said:
How is that a more serious concern? They are selling your house, via 2 sets of solicitors and loads of contracts and forms, they know who you are and where you live. Not taking a photocopy of your passport and utility bill to put in a file is meaningless, it’s an absolute non story and again you would love to know who has the pull to just get this stuff placed in a national paper as ‘news’ and a chance for most of the article to be a rehash of the original one.
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The article suggests it:

A spokesperson for the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PSRA), the body that oversees estate agents, said a “client risk assessment and customer due diligence (collection of ID and proof of address) is obtained by the estate agent prior to the commencement of the property service”.

“If customer due diligence is not carried out by the estate agent, it is a breach of the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010,” they added.
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I would have thought errors and omissions in know your customer/anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) procedures would be a concern.
 
My lasts posts under this thread were deleted so this post may be too.

It seems like someone is targeting this particular agent, whose company is very successful and has taken market share from the other established players over the last number of years
 
Setforlife said:
How is that a more serious concern? They are selling your house, via 2 sets of solicitors and loads of contracts and forms, they know who you are and where you live. Not taking a photocopy of your passport and utility bill to put in a file is meaningless,
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If that were truly the case we'd have no need for AML but prior to those laws being introduced property was a common method for organised crime to launder money. The quote from the client would the agent didn't know them outside of that transaction.

It's a criminal offence for designated person to fail to record those details. This one almost certainly an oversight based on what has been reported, but they were foolish to put it in a text message.
 
Cameo said:
company is very successful and has taken market share from the other established players over the last number of years
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They've been taking out half-page colour ads for some tasty south Dublin properties in the Sunday Times Home supplement for a while now. They don't come cheap.
 
I was chatting with my sister in law who has worked for many years as an EA for one of the larger EAs in Ireland, but has worked for a few others before that. She said this mystery shopper practice is totally normal for EAs. They all do it, all the time. I asked what is the point of doing it and the rest of the conversation taught me some things that I didnt know.
Some of the main lessons I learned here.

EAs always have a discount that they can offer on the fees, depending on how are they are finding it to get the vendor to sign with them. They feel the vendor out and will come down from their headline commission or knock money off of advertising fees etc. In this case they could have been sussing out what the competition will give up to grab a vendor.

Sussing out sales techniques and valuation profiles that competitors use. Even learning new tricks from people who they might consider to be the more successful EAs, which bings us to the last point.

There is huge poaching and headhunting of staff that goes on in the EA business. This is also a way to scope out potential targets that you want to poach. A sly job interview that the interviewee doesnt even know is happening, I suppose.

Now all of this came as a surprise to me. I didnt give it much thought until it was spelled out for me. Especially the last one I was very surprised at, but then I got to thinking that when I used to do renovations in shops many years ago, I often heard the clients talking about scoping out the competition in much the same ways as above. I would see the owner of a beauty salon calling around other salons enquiring in great detail about treatments offered and prices and any discounts available. And in some places I would overhear plans to poach staff being hatched.
 
I can't see anything wrong in that

Staff are free to leave a job and get another if the pay and/or conditions suit them better

Shopping to find out what your competitors are charging is better than having the suppliers setup a cartel and carve the market out for themselves
 
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