Online agency Ewemove has dropped a promise made to some clients early this year that it would sell their home within 77 days or you can withdraw your property and pay no fee - and it cannot say whether any property was sold in the target time.
Back in February Ewemove, a franchise agency, told Estate Agent Today that each property on its books would be given what it called mammoth marketing and there would be no sneaky hidden charges to clients.
However, an investigation by Estate Agent Today has revealed that Ewemove has now dropped its 77 day sale-or-no-fee offer - without any of the publicity which accompanied its introduction.
Ewemove sales and marketing director Glenn Ackroyd says: The 77 day sale guarantee has recently been changed - we realised that saying that you can go to another agent and pay no fee was not markedly different from other agents' standard contracts.
But when Estate Agent Today asked if the agency had figures to show how many sales it achieved within the 77 day target period, or how many buyers withdrew their properties and paid no fee as a result, the answer was No.
There was also a suggestion that the offer may not have been used by each franchisee anyway, despite being advertised on Ewemove's website.
A spokeswoman for the firm stated that the information is not readily available without a lot of manual work. It would mean contacting each franchisee to determine who used this as a promotion and then correlate this against sales.
The agency says it has 43 branches currently - two physical ones, in Sheffield and Gainsborough, and the rest as virtual branches with named agents in localities operating from home and using mobile telephone numbers as main points of contact. Ewemove also says it intends to open nine more agencies this month and another 12 in January.
When Estate Agent Today made contact last week, the site also declined to say how many homes for sale it carried overall although it said that by August 27 it had new 53 properties for sale so far this month.
Using the search facility on the Ewemove site on Friday, Estate Agent Today could find no properties for sale within a 15 mile radius of many major locations such as Plymouth, Exeter, Bristol, Swansea, Brighton, Cheltenham, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. The website carried three properties for sale across Greater London and five in Birmingham.
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