Langford Russell Reviews 

It is some time now, but we used Langford Russell's Bromley office to sell our 2 bed flat in 2017. It was a terrible experience and I would not recommend using their services in future.

We were initially impressed by their pitch and felt we were in safe hands. Unfortunately, almost immediately after we had signed the contract, the gentleman we had been dealing with was transferred to another branch.

The remaining staff were largely unhelpful in the following ways:

1. Viewings booked after about 5pm on weekdays could not be handled by them and would need to be done by us. Quite why we were paying them nearly £10k for the service is therefore beyond me, particularly given that many of our viewers worked during the day and therefore wanted evening or weekend viewings;

2. I received a phone call one evening when out for dinner from a lady at the agency asking where I was. She had booked a viewing in for that evening and told me the wrong date to be there, so we had viewers come to see the property and nobody there to show it. I can understand a mix up happening, but the caller was discourteous to me despite my being her client and despite the fact that she had the time to call me to demand where I was, but didn't have the time to go do the viewing herself. When asked whether I would go home to perform the viewing, I explained that I couldn't as I was about an hour from home and the mistake had been made at their end. There was no apology for this;

3. We arrived home late on a Saturday following a week's holiday to find that our front door and terrace door had not been locked post-viewings. We are unsure as to how long it was left like that;

4. Legal details about the state of the lease extension of our onward purchase, including some address detail was shared with our buyers without asking for our consent to do so and when challenged I was told that this was necessary to keep all parties informed and that this was company policy, with no hint of understanding that this might include personal data for the purposes of the Data Protection Act and now under the GDPR. I didn't report this to the ICO, but I cannot believe that it is their company policy to risk breaching data protection legislation. If it is, I suggest they update that;

5. It was agreed that new photos of our property would be taken. We then heard nothing about this until one day we saw on Rightmove that new photos had been uploaded. This meant that they allowed access to a third party to our apartment without warning us or obtaining our consent. I understand that when you sign up with an estate agent, you give them a key to your property. As I understand it, this is not the same as giving the right to enter at will and so they effectively entered the property without our consent to do so. They apologised for this one, but the sheer nerve of them doing this is unsettling and shows primarily that they should not be accorded the level of trust inherent in their duties;

6. At the end of the transaction, because things were slow moving on our upward transaction, the branch manager started chasing us on behalf of the buyer. We had to remind him that we were his client, not the buyer.

I truly wish I hadn't paid these people the over £8,000 in transaction fees incurred with them and they have put us off using traditional estate agents in future.

In short, our experience with Langford Russell exemplifies why I believe that the UK should put in place a regulatory authority to authorise and monitor the fitness of estate agents. These individuals are dealing with large transactions involving hundreds of thousands of Pounds and do not seem to require any training in technical or ethical standards before they are foisted onto the public to deal with people at what is a stressful time. I do believe that there are genuinely some very conscientious and trustworthy estate agents working in the industry, but I also believe that the people we dealt with at Langford Russell showed themselves to be less than both.