Permabanned
Nobody pays for a valuation. You phone up multiple estate agents, they come around, wander about and pull a figure from their arse. They then add 20% to this figure and your job is to sell your house with whoever quoted the highest.
This has worked, especially in London since around 2010. However, we're in a brave new world that anyone under the age of about 25 has never experienced (short of a couple of years of very small falls) and that's called houses FALLING in value.
On the continent estate agents will come around, measure all the rooms and work out the price per sq.ft and this gives you a good basis for the properties value in that area. In the UK it's just made up based upon whatever has sold recently in the area, higher prices just lead to higher prices and it keeps going until something snaps, then starts working in reverse. We're at that reverse, and estate agents will never have experienced this situation and won't know what to do.
Transactions have absolutely bombed. Far fewer people are moving home and estate agents have remained solvent with rentals and charging exorbitant fees for tenant checks. When these are abolished in the near future they will be relying far more on actually selling houses and instead of the old quoting at max +20% they will have to start being realistic as they will NEED those houses to sell.
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