Fine and Country North Lincolnshire

Before we signed up with Fine and Country North Lincolnshire we were with an estate agent called Gainsborough Estates (Hence forth referred to as G.E. for brevity). We had been quite happy with G.E. and were only convinced to changeover as we were told that G.E. would be shortly closing in Epworth and that from then on G.E. would be branded Fine & Country (North Lincolnshire - this bit has only been seen on some of their signs). Basically G.E. were launching the Fine & Country franchise in our area and we were either going to be changed over at that time or when the G.E. office was closed. We elected to join the Fine & Country brand. That's when things seemed to go wrong. Before that G.E. had managed to get people in to see our property and they genuinely seemed keen to make a sale.

BUT.

Firstly, the Fine and Country office seemed to take forever to appear. Whenever we asked the Fine & Country people what the proposed time scales were they were unable to give any sort of hard answer. Usually it was something like "in a few weeks". The Fine & Country office is now in Epworth. Months later. Albeit without a sign, much in the way of properties for sale and no entry (at this date) on yell.com etc. We felt that having a "shop window" in Epworth was important as potential buyers might see our property in their shop window BUT we left them long before they managed to achieve this.

Secondly, the website. The Fine & Country website (www.fineandcountry.com) comes in two flavours. UK and South African. The South African side of the website has what I consider to be an excellent search facility. Well laid out and very professional. It impressed me. The UK side of the site was quite the opposite! The UK search function was pretty basic and accompanied by a map search that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't work. (I tried using Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer). I was informed by the Fine & Country people that this was going to be "upgraded". It never has been and is the same today as it was months ago, when we joined Fine & Country. The other big problem with the website was that we weren't on there! Neither were other properties in the area. At the time there was a house for sale in Burnham (Upper or Lower I don't know which) and Belton, yet they did NOT feature on the Fine & Country website. I contacted Fine & Country and they informed me that they could see the property details, which was nice. They could as they were the persons who were meant to upload the property details. Myself, and all those potential buyers out there, couldn't see our details or those of the properties in Burnham and Belton because they had not been uploaded properly. After my call this was corrected but we'd lost about three weeks of selling time. I must say that our property details were on RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK (twice) and it took a great deal of effort to have the second entry removed.

Please note that Fine & Country is a franchise. The website isn't controlled by your local branch but by the head office in London. So if there's a problem the local people cannot do anything about it!

Telecommunications. Or the lack of. So there we are, our property up for sale and our details now on the Fine & Country website. Pity that nobody was answering the phones. On one occasion it took me 5 attempts to get to talk to someone. The email address for Fine & Country, a hotmail/yahoo kind of account, just bounced straight back to me with a 550 user unknown error. Another phone Faux Pas was calling a Fine & Country person only to be passed to an answer service that said "Please leave a message". No reference to Fine & Country. For all I knew, I could have been talking to a Swedish massage parlour. That was the response a potential caller would have received. Not impressive.

It wasn't a surprise that the number of viewers to our home dropped dramatically during this period.

We took the only course open to us and dumped Fine & Country and rejoined Gainsborough Estates. At least they could answer the phone and handle their own website.

Since we left Fine & Country they have now opened an office in Epworth. It's without a sign, pretty basic on the inside (a shell) and the telephone number is a total mystery. It's fair to say that they may have improved but I would approach using their service with a strong sense of caution.