Recess Monkey – I feel your pain.

In the bad old days of only a few months ago, I used to have to queue 15 minutes every time I visited Abbey National. It drove me nuts.

Now some genius has installed a new system.  The Cheese Counter System.  We take a ticket and we wait to be called.

In the meantime a screen keeps us up to date with our estimated waiting time.

The result? 

They’ve actually managed to increase waiting time.  The pic above shows 18 minutes and counting.  It was up to over 20 by the time they served me.

Unfortunately for the poor bastards behind me, by the time I left it was up to 23.  The reason being that it takse a while to empty and close your account.

Because there’s no way I’m using up 20 minutes of another lunch hour to deal with them ever again.

* NB Went straight into Nat West and payed my savings in there instead.  Waiting time: zero minutes.

“ba phone number that actually gets through”

Poor bastards – there must be thousands of them out there – listening to hold music, if they’re lucky, but more likely simply being told, via a recorded message, that BA is just too busy to talk to them.  As the days, then weeks, go by they wonder will they ever see their cases again.

There is just nothing you can do.  Nothing that BA haven’t suffered.  No threat you can make against them.  Legal?  Media?  Shame?  Whatever.  It’s water off a ducks back now.  I feel your pain.

Altogether brighter, fresher, closer to work and with that all important sitting out area for the summer.

So how did we find it? Well, we saw it on Gumtree.

For the unenlightened, Gumtree is just a place to buy, sell, giveaway or swap things. You can put up pictures, info, contacts details – in short, virtually everything you need to know to decide whether or not you want to view a house.

We saw the pics. We liked it. We arranged a viewing. We liked it. We agreed the deal. It’s that simple.

All done without the use of a lettings agency.

Our lettings agency experiences weren’t so positive. Pattisons made an appointment they didn’t keep. Then they rang me a whole two weeks later to see if I wanted to see another property. Understandably we said no and explained why. They didn’t apologise.

They did, however, ring up again the next day to ask: do you want to see another property? Lettings agents, it seems, have thick skins.

I trawled one by one, the lettings agent paradise of Acorn Road in Jesmond. Every last one of them, without fail, told me just to check their websites. I did they were all, without exception, wildly out of date and lacking the most basic of info.

Acorn Properties were the most friendly but their initially businesslike manner was ruined by not getting back to me on two occasions when I tried to set up viewings.

When I checked out the Adderstones Group’s website I was amazed to find that the details it provided included only a downloadable pdf of properties available – no pics, no details. Try working through that.

On other occasions agents couldn’t even find details when we rang up asking about properties when we saw them either on the web or marked by To Let boards. Other agents didn’t even have websites. Can you imagine?

So what do we expect of Lettings Agents? Well we want the obvious. We want to be met at properties when we make appointments. We want agents to keep us in mind when new properties become available that meet our requirements. We want them to return our calls and our emails (I genuinely don’t think many letting agency employees even understand email). We want them to, unlike Bowsons Lettings, keep their word and behave with some level of ethics and decency.

When we say we are interested in properties in East Newcastle we don’t expect reams of badly photocopied brochures through our letterboxes detailing houses in Gateshead.

But…

You could also argue that agents don’t actually have to do any of this because, although they haven’t spotted it, their world has already changed

You see, really we don’t need them at all. We just need a website that functions and some way of contacting the owner without the agent slowing things down.

I want to see pics on the site. Lots of them. I want to be able to enlarge them. I want to be able to send questions. I’d like to see a diary where I can place viewing bookings. I want each property to have its own url so I can forward them individually to my partner for her consideration.

Comments from past viewers might be cool too. If I was a landlord and none of the viewers took the property I’d be interested to know why.

Most of all I want it to be up to date. I don’t want to waste my time checking up on properties that have already gone or may not even reach the market. None of this is hard. Newspapers change their entire websites overnight – we’re only asking agents to weed out those properties already spoken for.

Gumtree already provides much of this and it was significant that my house hunting only became successful once we ditched the agents.

Using an agent would have cost me in the region of £400 more in fees. By not using one I have been able to use the saved cash (almost £70 a month over a six month contract) to find an altogether nicer property. By searching myself and dealing directly with the owner I have also had much better service than what the agents charge so much for.

In truth, the estate agency industry will die and its employees don’t even appear to know it. When they could be promoting the human side of what they can offer, as opposed to the more efficient high tech option, they’re not even keeping up with basic business courtesies. They’ve either already given up or have just been spoiled by housing booms gone by.

The very next time I do any of this as seller/buyer or landlord/tenant I won’t be using agents. They simply aren’t needed any more. Everything is better and easier if I do it myself.

Will anyone miss them when they’re gone?

* Since being treated badly by Bowson Lettings over 20 people have found their way to this website having searched for the agency. No doubt they read what I wrote and I am sure the vast majority decided to go with a more reputable agent. Good.

Is anyone really surprised? Does anyone who has ever used British Airways actually have anything good to say about them?

Last year when I flew back from Nicaragua, British Airways lost my bag. I was left with a phone number to call to try and trace it.

I called it. It was so busy that I couldn’t even go into a queue. My God, how many bags had they lost?

They recorded message simply told me to ring back another time. I tried and tried and tried and I never got through to one human being on that phone line. I didn’t even get to join the queue – not even the luxury of being exasperated by hold music.

I started ringing all numbers. I no longer cared that I was ringing the wrong hotline. I just wanted to speak to a person. Nothing, nothing and nothing.

Some weeks later I came home and wandered what that was in the backyard. It was my bags. I hadn’t been in so they just chucked them round the back.

No letter of apology or anything. No follow up phone call or email. Can you imagine any other organisation behaving like this?

Traveling by air is not fun. It’s almost as if the airlines know they are the bad guys. Like they’ve decided to cut back on every customer comfort and maximise their profits before the green lobby catches up with them.

If their customers hate them in the meantime then what do they care?  If it’s all going to come crashing down then they might as well be architects of their own downfall.  Better that, they must reason, than letting the Greenies do it.

I liked this from author Anthony Horowitz who was caught up in the debacle with his family:

The one thing I didn’t see at Heathrow was the expected demonstration by environmental groups such as Greenpeace or Plane Stupid. But perhaps they weren’t needed. There were, after all, thousands of people protesting for them, albeit in a rather lacklustre and disorganised way. They were called passengers.

And at the end of the day, it is their voice that may put an end to the vexed question of airport expansion. The bigger it gets the worse it gets, and I’d guess that modern air travel carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. There will have to come a time when everyone decides that anything is better than seat 27K behind the lavatory… even staying at home.

The environmentalists only have to wait, because in the end they’ve simply got to win.