Estate agency CEO puts firm’s service ‘through its paces’ with own home

Many estate agents will achieve landmark sales during their careers, but Yopa agent Matthew Drewery has recently been tasked with arguably the most important of them all – selling his boss’s home.

And so far so good – he has found a buyer for Yopa CEO Verona Frankish’s six-bedroom barn conversion in the Nottinghamshire village of Sturton-Le-Steeple (main image) within a few weeks of going on the market.

Currently ‘sold subject to contract’, it was marketed by Yopa at £895,000 and comes with a garden room, jacuzzi, rear terrace and garden and 4489 sq ft of interior space.

Frankish made it clear that the sale was a test, saying when it came onto the market that “in our roles, we don’t often get to truly experience our own service offering – not really.

“So this is an opportunity for me to put us through our paces, and I fully intend to do exactly that”.

She also tells The Neg that: “I’ve been incredibly impressed with our [online] Hub experience – where we have been able to connect directly with buyers, chat with the agent and have full visibility of feedback on the property.

“The communication throughout the process both from the agent and the centrally generated process updates have been really helpful. There have been one or two areas where I think we could improve the look and feel of our emails, but these were small points in the overall process.

“Our agent has been excellent (and yes of course I would’ve expected that) but I’m very confident that he has followed his usual process for this transaction, with the care that he provides to all his customers.”

Up-front information

Frankish also decided to provide up-front information including a full legal pack prior to listing, saying that this meant being fully prepared when coming to market.

“The process helped us highlight a couple of gaps in the documentation that we needed and didn’t have, so we were able to secure this, meaning that when we listed we were very confident that we were fully transparent with the buyers,” she says.

But in a nationally sluggish market, did Frankish expect her home to sell so soon? “In my area, properties of this value don’t come to the market too often, so it is always tricky to predict the interest level. We spent time prior to listing, getting the property into ‘sell-mode’, and we were very intentional with the marketing and the timing to enable us to achieve the desired outcome.

“We fully understood that the longer a property stays on the market without interest, the less-attractive it becomes to potential buyers so we listed at a price that would generate interest early on.”