Tenants and landlords have taken to social media en masse to voice angry complaints against Purplebricks’ property management service.
Until now, this has been provided on a white-labelled basis by a number of high street firms, although customers have only known the service as Purplebricks.
The agents still providing it are now coming to the end of their notice periods.
Purplebricks has apologised to landlords and tenants, saying that there have been transition issues as it brings the service in-house.
One complaint said: “I do not understand how you became the fastest growing agency? We tried to call you for the past two weeks with no answer until today. Property manager still not answering anyway. I am going to have to leave my home because of your fab customer service! Feel sick.”
Another complained: “A full 5 days waiting for leasehold management team to call me back. Pay for a full management service. Yet they cannot be bothered to ring their customers back.”
Another posted a one-star review on Trustpilot headed: “Purplebricks ceased trading?”
The writer said: “This is my fourth review of PB and nothing is improving . . .
“I know my tenants’ check-out report was completed on April 30. I will need to retain a part of the deposit due to the condition of the property, however, I have heard nothing from PB.
“The rental portal is defunct and cannot be used for new queries … the generic email inbox provided to me by a third party has produced no response.
“Should shareholders and customers be worried?”
A Purplebricks spokesperson said: “We have now achieved sufficient scale in lettings, and following customer feedback we have decided to bring our property management services in-house.
“This will give us greater control and provide an even better service to our customers and includes the launch of two new property management hubs and a specialist dedicated property manager for all tenants and landlords.
“We are working hard to clear any problems for customers during this transition phase and apologise for any issues.
“Our new service will be of the highest quality.”
Comments (14)
I’ve just taken on a rental property from PB after they tried to offer it to someone completely unsuitable and the landlord said no way.
The gas safety certificate that PB arranged to have done didn’t have a date on it. Thats says a lot about their QA systems.
a specialist dedicated property manager for all tenants and landlords.
Now that’s a clue as how bad it could turn out to be. Lettings is by far more hands on than sales, extremely time consuming and requires local feet on the ground to work effectively. Other big names have tried to use call centres and I don’t know one of them after years, that does anything but fire fight and minimum as possible. Even school children can work it out, their staffing for the volume of work cannot be serviced, just as it isn’t with their sales, there just aren’t enough minutes in the day for just the telephone service alone.
Not sure, here’s some simple maths relating to sales; New instructions over 6,000 per month (Source PB) divided by sales agreed 78% (source PB) divide by time you spend on taking a sale from offer to completion(minutes) to the 78%. How many staff do you need for a month, working 7 hour (net of lunch) and 5 day week? and we haven’t even talked about other work that have to do with listing properties, valuing, finding buyers, money laundering checks etc etc etc. Now multiply by the 3 times workload (conservative estimate) that inloves lettings.
Why would anyone build a business for PB and then once established have it taken away, obviously didn’t read the small print.
traitors
Their business plan to “dominate” the lettings market is to buy portfolios as opposed to growing organically with good service. This has been highlighted with their recent acquisition of the new Northen Hub however all has not gone to plan!
26 members of staff have left the well established company which provides a service to over 1800 landlords which PB bought last April and that’s taken a massive toll on the service levels that are promised to both tenants and landlords.
It’s been over one year for them to stabilise things during what they call a transitional period however with complaints rolling in by the dozen on a daily basis, experienced and knowledgeable staff being replaced by anyone foolish enough to believe their cult like promises of a purple future its a long way from being a happy ever after story!!
Not surprising really. The CEO is ex Countrywide and anyone familiar with their ‘migration’ practices on acquisitions would know that its generally an unmitigated disaster! As for other agents doing the managing for PB well; it’s either very clever or very stupid. Clever if the management returns after PB ***** up or stupid because you have allowed a competitor time to ‘get their ducks in a row’ to do even more to take business away form you and your traditional model. Personally, I wouldn’t do anything for an organisation that wants to put me out of business but; what do I know!!
Who are these traitor estate agents who behave like wolves with purple sheep skins. ?? Shame on You.
If the report is accurate and they only sell around half of their properties, I wonder if they only let a similar amount. According to Zoopla they have been trying to let some properties have been almost 2 years?? Bit odd that
I guess you’ve heard the term you get what you pay for?
My advice to anyone employing a cheap bucket end service in any industry is, don’t complain, they’re cheap for a reason?
I couldn’t agree more, they want to pay peanuts then whine when they get a shoddy service
Yes, but if you are promised a service for that price you should be entitled to receive it or be duly compensated.
See PIE story http://www.propertyindustryeye.com/could-purplebricks-have-to-repay-millions-chris-wood-suggests-how-customers-might-claim-money-back/ 😉
its not the fault of tenants when a tight landlord gets missold by purplebricks marketing machine. Where will this end.? iam afraid that the lord no longer recognises these new rules of trading.
They obviously havent scaled it up much if they are only having one property manager for all landlords and tenants. Most letting agencies have at least 2-3 per office.