Hard to believe that someone working on comission would treat a prospective customer like that. I have no idea how commonplace this attitude is in the UK, but while living in Germany for a few years I found it was fairly prevalent there.

Do they just not mind losing sales?

I don't get your point. We are actually very fortunate that estate agency in this country is still largely unregulated.

Yes there are some cowboys - just like in any market - but there is fierce competition for business and real estate agencies fees in England and Wales are some of the lowest in the world - often as low as 1.5%.

Would you prefer a regulated profession at three times the price?

Julius's comment about market competition reinforces my puzzlement why somebody paid on commission would behave as JP describes. Why wouldn't customer behavior create evolutionary pressure to improve customer service, if competition exists? Do customers in the UK perhaps feel that pleasant customer service is a sign of weakness, or incompetence?

By the way, Julius's use of "cowboy" also perplexes me. The foremost elements of the cowboy stereotype are strength, self-sufficiency, and maybe a certain disdain for conventional expectations. Perhaps Julius was looking for the word "asshole", which seems to fit the tone of the story.

While I agree with Julius, that "regulation" (ie state control) would be A Bad Thing, I also agree with Johnathan about the attitude problem frequently encountered in British estate agents.

Curiously, the same is often true among car salesmen and both these trades have a deservedly poor reputation as a conseuence.

What particularly galls me is the condescending attitude when you tell them that you can't afford that £1,000,0000 'bargain' house or £80,000 car, when, clearly, they are usually even less likely to be able to find that sort of money.

There are exceptions, of course, but the public opprobrium didn't appear for no reason.

If the UK real estate market is unregulated and highly competitive, and if UK agents really are rude, then it must follow that it is profitable to be rude.

Perhaps British citizens are more often easily embarrassed that they can not afford some prestigious price, so that a condescending agent can cow them into paying more than they can afford.

Getting people to buy a more expensive house is certainly profitable if you are paid a fixed percentage commission.

The thing with estate agents is, very few people are going to buy a different house simply because the estate agent is bad.

Estate agents compete to find sellers, not to find buyers. They suceed by selling houses for as much as possible, making sellers happy and raising their revenue in the process. So, buyers get a pretty bad service from estate agents.

But, it nothing compared to what they get from solicitors. Buy a house in the UK and you are legally required to pay a solicitor several hundred pounds for doing little more than rubber stamping some forms. They are at least polite about it...

"Why wouldn't customer behavior create evolutionary pressure to improve customer service, if competition exists? "

Think "basking shark". Even an idiot wandering around with his mouth open will scoop up and catch food, provided his mouth is big enough and he keeps moving. A lot of little food is enough for a meal. It's the same business model as used by spammers.

At a random guess, the asshole on the phone is going to be roadkill in the near future.

You see, the British housing market has just ended a period of price inflation. In such a situation, people had to fight to buy a house, and dumb estate agents were just another hurdle for buyers in a seller's market.

Especially around London, it is now a buyer's market. Either the idiot on the phone doesn't realise this, or he isn't making his target. If option A holds, he won't hold his job for long. If option B holds, he's already looking for something more up his line...like selling used cars.

"Even an idiot wandering around with his mouth open will scoop up and catch food, provided his mouth is big enough and he keeps moving."

Hard to imagine a better opening for a Michael Moore joke...

I'm not convinced the analogy to real estate sales works (in the US, anyway). Agents don't earn a lot of small commissions each year, but rather a few large ones. Rather than a basking shark, perhaps an anaconda that eats a nutria every month or two, if it can catch one? Given that a difference of one or two commissions each year could be very important to an agent, and that most real estate business comes from people who go out looking for brokerage services rather than people responding to cold calls, I would think customer service is something the agents would want to get right. If that's not the case, I'm obviously missing something.

I have purchased and sold residential real estate in Ohio and New York in the USA. I have reached the conclusion that most real estate sales creatures live under rocks and eat invertebrates. I see from your complaint that this true even in England, where we thought everybody was so polite because they all learned their manners from the Queen. If intelligent life is discovered on another planet, their real estate sale creatures will undoubtedly behave poorly as well.

This smells like a business opportunity for someone to set up the American system of buyer's agents.

If the UK real estate market is unregulated and highly competitive, and if UK agents really are rude, then it must follow that it is profitable to be rude.

Not necessarily. Competition, like evolution, doesn't deliver perfect solutions but workable ones. Rudeness may just be a product of the process of recruitment and training that is insufficiently disavantageous to be eliminated in a particular market niche.

I doubt that selling to rich cash buyers who have multiple houses estate agents are anything but perfectly polite.

Being too poor to buy, I have a different experience in the rental market. Estate agents there are polite but utterly mendacious. A plausible explanation: going somewhere else is easy (so they want your custom); but suing them on any particular mis-represented contract is either not worth the cost or may imperil one's continuing occupation.

Buy a house in the UK and you are legally required to pay a solicitor several hundred pounds for doing little more than rubber stamping some forms.

Actually not. But it is useful to have someone who will be responsible if the conveyancing goes wrong. And most people are utterly defeated by the forms and searches that are advisable. Note that the government is trying very hard to increase the number of forms that are required, and has recently changed the nature of the tax on house sales to make it more intrusive.

I don't want to start another cycle of violence discussion but if a caller is that rude I usually have no compuntion about telling them to go f___ themselves and hanging up the phone.

The more polite ones I make up revolutionary causes to talk about ad nauseum while they try vainly to get back on the subject of the product or service they are trying to sell. Long live the Guam Liberation Front!

perhapse that should be a "cycle of rudeness discussion" to be more acurate.

You might likle to visit HousePriceChat.co.uk for some interesting discussion about the future movements of housing.

Could it be that certain forms of bad behavior are cultural artifacts that have nothing to do with government? Does the UK have an MLS system? In the US, houses are generally put on a computer system and if I've been insulted by an agent, I can fire him, call up another agent, get access to exactly the same housing stock and be treated better as well. Sellers like MLS because they get better access to buyers so they won't use agents who won't put their property into the MLS system.

There is no such thing as a seller's or buyers market in the US under the MLS system. Any agent can be fired for poor service without affecting either seller or buyer in their ability to make the transaction. So why does the UK have rude agents? You might as well ask why they wear funny hats in Texas or Turkey.

TM Lutas - They don't wear funny hats in Turkey because these were outlawed by Attaturk in 1925. I know this because I read a highly entertaining and compelling book by Jeremy Seal called A Fez of the Heart. The subtitle is 'Travels around Turkey in search of a hat' and it is a compulsive and ravishing read.

I wouldn't necessarily opt for the U.S. system. While not unfriendly, real estate agents, developers and builders are widely considered as dishonest and vile as attorneys. The increasing public feeling about this is why the Real Estate Agents of America has started ramping up a P.R. campaign. I know of several business owners who refuse to work with people in real estate in their capacity.

The problem with a market system in this case (though I can't see a better alternative), is that most people do not make frequent real estate purchases. And referral business, while great, is not easy to get by any means. So the agents don't get punished for misbehavior.

In my first bit of real estate buying, I fired 4 agents. The next time I only fired 2. It does not take long to figure out who is providing unsatisfactory service.

And yes, I thought of Ataturk... right after I hit send.

Julius asks if I would want a regulated estate agent market. The answer is no. What makes him think I would want that anyway?

My guess is that the fellow on the telephone is under pressure to clear sales and got aggressive in pursuit of his target. But as a commenter above said, the fellow is likely to be out of a job fairly fast if he carries on talking to folk like this.

For what it is worth, I have dealt with other agents who are a lot nicer, so maybe I got unlucky.

For British readers, there is a perfectly simple and easy remedy for an estate agent who serves you poorly: don't pay.

The estate agents who sold my house in Britain had given appalling service, disobeying instructions, being incompetent, being disagreeable and over-familiar and matey over the phone. The house was listed with several agents who were a couple of notches up on these people, but the eventual buyer came through them. Then they messed up on several points as the sale went through.

When it finally went through, and we had the cheque, my solicitor sent me a list of the charges. I OKayed the charges for the legal firm and their expenses and for the surveyor. However, I declined to pay the full commission to the estate agents. I wrote the solicitor a letter, copying the realtor, instructing that a cheque be sent for only two-thirds of their normal commission. I listed all the reasons, including rude behaviour and ignoring instructions expressed in simple language and great clarity. There was nothing the solicitor could do about it. He couldn't disburse my funds other than as I directed. If they'd wanted to recover the other one-third which I held back, they'd have had to start legal proceedings, and not only wasn't it worth it, they knew bloody fine that I had a case.

You don't have to be a doormat. You hold the purse strings. That makes you the boss of the episode.