Spicer Haart > Reviews > Home is not where the Haart is

Author's product rating:   

Staff courtesy	Average
Value for money - of service	Poor
Comprehensiveness of service	Average
Speed of sale	Average
Range of property available	Very Poor

Advantages:	nationwide well known estate agent
Disadvantages:	hopeless search facilities online and unhelpful staff

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

This opinion is written from the perspective of someone looking to buy a property on the Haart website rather than sell a property, although it should provide some sobering thoughts for anyone about to put their house on the market with Spicer Haart.

I am currently house hunting and as I am looking to buy a property that is not in my local area the internet has been a great resource. I also think that websites are the way forward when selling a property and would make my choice of agent to sell my house taking into account the web services they offer. There are many fabulous websites out there that will show you just what an agent has available, give you details of the property online and possibly even give you a plan or a virtual tour together with information about the local area. Unfortunately www.Haart.co.uk is not one of these.

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Design
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Someone really needs to address the design of the site and quickly. The home page appears muddled and often fails to load correctly. The colouring, whilst attractive to the eye makes the site very difficult to read. The page is divided into three frames, one across the top (containing some very funky, yet pretty pointless animation), one down the left side (to navigate the site) and the final taking up about 2/3rds of the page (it is this frame which contains the information).

The information contained on the page is muddled, cramped and hard to read. It looks more like a 6 year olds effort at cutting and pasting from a newspaper into a scrap book than a professionally designed web page from a leading company. It is enough to put you right off the site without going any further were it not for the fact that Haart is such a household name.

Let's assume that you make it past the design blunders and into the body of the site to search for a house. What are you going to find?

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Search Facilities
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First point to note is that this site is very slow (and I was accessing it from work where we have a permanent connection to the web!). You will then be greeted with a pretty standard screen which asks you to enter your search criteria. This is one place where Haart could learn from the other sites. There is no facility to state how many reception rooms you need, whether you want a garden or a garage and this can often lead to multiple results that are pointless and is a facility which is provided by most other search engines.

OK you decide to search. By way of illustration I typed in the following details:

County: Surrey
Town: Woking
Price: £0 - £250
Bedrooms: 3-4 beds
Type: Any

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Where are all the houses then….
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After a long wait the search facility came back with a total of 91 properties (a little daunting but there should be something worth seeing there). Now we hit the real problem….

Click on the first property. Ahhh, helpful " Sold - ANOTHER WANTED No Picture available - Please contact the Office directly for further details". So you click the back button (as the return to properties button at the bottom of the page just reloads the page you are on) and lo and behold the data is missing so you have to refresh the page…. yet another long wait. Surprise surprise number 2 is SOLD too, number 3 exists but all you get is a picture and a reference number - no details about where the house might be, what rooms it has or anything else that might actually be helpful.

Properties 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 have all been the same "SOLD - another wanted". What's the point of maintaining houses on their website if they are all sold? You might argue that if you are looking to sell your house then you might be tempted to use them as they appear to have sold a lot of properties but why not have a section that is dedicated to showing potential sellers examples of properties that have been recently sold. As a buyer I am not interested in what I might have had (especially as I can't even see a picture) I am interested in what I can have. And don't forget to learn that houses 4,6,7,8,9 and 10 were sold I had to use my browser's back button and reload the data every time.

Experience states that you don't fare any better if you visit their branches or get yourselves on their mailing list. They insist on sending you details of properties that do not match your search criteria and if, like me, you want to consider properties in quite a wide price bracket they only seem willing to show you properties at the top end of your price range. This is not encouraging me to buy and would certainly put me off trying to sell my house through Haart knowing what a struggle it is to find a property on their site.

There are so many good sites out there including www.asserta.co.uk , www.findaproperty.co.uk and www.propertylive.co.uk all of which deal with properties from multiple agents that I really would consider using these over and above Haart.