Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to review the service you received from Lillingtons. We truly value your feedback and will consider it carefully. We were delighted to achieve a successful sale for you, especially after this is something your first two agents failed to do. It takes great skill as an estate agent to successfully re-launch a property to the open market when it has already been seen by so many potential buyers and so we were pleased that we achieved a positive outcome for you. We know you and your wife were delighted too and we appreciated your wife taking the time to give us such a glowing review on our Facebook page. We are sorry to hear that you felt the communication after the agreed sale, did not meet your expectations. Lillingtons understand how stressful a property related transaction can be and it is not often that we receive that kind of feedback from our clients. However it was very encouraging to learn from our team, that despite your feedback, you would be more than happy to use us again and as such we will genuinely look forward to welcoming your business again in the future. We agree with you in relation to your comments surrounding a ‘thank you’. We always endeavour to demonstrate thanks and appreciation for our client’s business throughout the entire Lillingtons experience but we will consider whether or not we need a more obvious recognition of this - such as a thank you card.

On behalf of Lillingtons, I do thank you for leaving your feedback. I am sorry to see you feeling this way & publically stating that we let you down in every area when we know this to be different, I would like to point out that although you have said that you chose Lillingtons because of promises made by myself, it was our valuer, who you met to gain your marketing advice when deciding to use us. You only met me at a later stage. While you worked with us our team went to a great deal of effort to achieve a sale for you including implementing a number of additional marketing products at our own cost and extra 'after hours' photographic visits from myself in order to continually improve your visual marketing. As you say, we were ultimately successful in introducing your buyer although you were then on the market with another agent. I am afraid that despite our efforts to be open and transparent with you about how our industry treats buyer introductions, you elected to be guided by your second agent who by rights should have immediately ceased any dealings with the offerer and referred you back to us as the introducing agent for your buyer. If they had done as they should, your experience would have been much simpler and more positive. In a final effort to be fair, we agreed to split our commission with the other agent and offer them an amount to progress the sale for you which they agreed to, however on exchange of contracts they attempted to invoice for more than the agreed split, something the legal representative can confirm. We can understand you being frustrated by the situation and are genuinely sorry that you feel like this, however in this instance we feel the good work our team does on a daily basis, and which is seen here on rateragent has been obscured by the unprofessional actions of the second agent.

Hi Ray. It is very disappointing to read your comments, it's never good to hear that customers are unhappy especially when we pride ourselves on our customer service and indeed we understood from your visit to our branch that you had been happy with our marketing and even commented on how well we had communicated with you, how many times we had revisited the property to help continuously improve the marketing and the speed and clarity of feedback you received from us after viewings. However, it would seem that since that visit your feelings have somewhat changed and that is a real shame. All we can do now is hopefully clarify a few things for you as this might help you with your property marketing arrangements going forward. With regards to the “termination charges” you will recall when we talked you through our terms of business in advance of marketing your property that we ask sellers to agree to a minimum period of marketing. This is known as an ‘agency period’ and is standard practice with most estate agents. An agency period is essentially us asking you to give us a ‘reasonable’ period of time to find a buyer, agree a sale and earn our fee, in exchange for no-upfront costs or charges being incurred by you, the seller. Before the end of the agency period, we understand from your visit to our branch that you wanted to move your property marketing to another agent as they were marketing the property that you wanted to buy. We highlighted the potential cost of terminating our agreement before the agency period had expired and even ran through the agreed terms of business with you in branch. I believe that we also suggested that it might be more beneficial for you to see out the agency period to prevent you from incurring any costs, however you decided to transfer within the agency period and as such the charges applied (inclusive of VAT at 20%). As a gesture of goodwill we reduced those charges for you. Hopefully this helps to clarify matters but if you would like to discuss further feel free to contact us at your local Lillingtons Branch. In the meantime we wish you every success with your moving plans and hope that it all works out for you.