In past few years, I saw quite a number of property developers like to outsourcing the sales & marketing jobs to property agent, especially those small and medium size developers. For example:
1. Pacific Place @ Ara Damansara
2. Element @ Ampang
3. Empire Damansara
4. Empire City
5. Sentul Prime Mall
....
By outsourcing to property agents, the developer do no need to maintain pool of sales and marketing staff to sell their property. In fact, there is a believe that property agent is expert in this area, so it is best to let them handle the sales.
However there are few drawback of this outsourcing concept to the consumer like us, for example
1. I encountered few incidents whereby different agents saying different things about the property. This would happened especially there are few different agents engaged by the developers and information is not flow correctly in between.
2. Usually the developer will engage few property agents to market their products instead of single source. The developer will cut their cake into few pieces and distribute to those agents. Therefore sometimes you may here agent A telling you that's the last unit left for this project, but in fact it is just the last unit left for his/her pool, not the last unit left for the entire projects.
3. As there are third party involve, sometimes the information provided by property agents may not come from the developer, it may be added by the agents. For example, property agent usually will encourage you to place some booking fee to book the unit and claim it is easily refundable without any charges. But things may be different as most of the developers will charge certain admins fees for any purchase cancellation.
Therefore, you may need to take extra precautions when you are dealing with property launch that mainly run by property agents.
Faced #2 before. The agent was stupid enough to actually tell it to us (like as if I'm gonna buy leftover units with him if there are better ones out there).
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