Yopa Review

Yopa Review - Online Estate Agent

Best RatingsRated #1 Best Online Estate Agent

Yopa Review

Overall Rating:

9.6

Value For Money = 9.7

Customer Support = 9.6

Reputation = 9.4

PROS:

  • Options to pay up-front or on completion
  • No need to manage and conduct viewings if you choose the Viewings Package add-on
  • ‘For Sale’ board is included as standard

CONS:

  • Higher fee for some postcodes in London
  • ‘No Sale, No Fee’ price in London is also quite high

Online Agents Reviewed:

13

Hours Of Research:

72

We’ve Featured In:

Media Property Road Has Featured In
Yopa Review [Updated 2024] – Yopa have attracted significant investment from a range of entrepreneurs and funds, including the parent company of the Daily Mail newspaper.

You may have seen them advertising on TV, but, let’s take a look at how they actually perform.

Our Yopa Review is based heavily on our own experience in successfully selling our home with Yopa when we moved from Nottingham to Lincolnshire.

At A Glance:

Yopa may have some really innovative, engaging TV adverts, and their website may be really well put together, but they are also a very serious online estate agent capable of selling homes.

In fact, they boast that over 10,000 trusted them to sell their home in the past year (May, 2020). We were actually one of those people when we sold our Nottingham home with Yopa in 2021.

Here’s how they perform in the most important areas:
  • Potential to save you thousands over high street agents
  • Full online management puts you in complete control
  • On average, those who sold with Yopa accepted an offer for 98% of their initial asking price
  • 92% of their customers rated them as ‘Great’ or ‘Excellent’ (February, 2024)
  • Dedicated local agents in most areas of the UK

A pretty strong performance so far from Yopa, but the headline figures don’t always reflect the bigger picture so let’s look at things in more detail…

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My Personal Experience Of Yopa – By The Founder Of Property Road

When we decided to sell our home, we thought it fair to give several agents, both online and offline, an opportunity to value our property.

As well as Yopa, we had a valuation from Strike and two local high street agents.

Yopa’s valuation fell in line with the high street agents (Strike’s valuation seemed a little too high) and our agent seemed very knowledgeable of the local area. More than anything, he actually seemed to want our business.

Within days of instructing Yopa we had some absolutely stunning property photos taken by the same agent we met on our valuation visit.

Our Yopa Experience

Once our property was on the market, we quickly started recieving viewing requests via the online Yopa Hub.

For each viewing request you can choose whether to accept or reject the viewing or propose a new time. We found this much more efficient than going back and forth on the phone with an agent acting as the middleman.

The downside? Not everyone fully engaged with the online system.

For these people, we would have to contact our local agent and ask them to follow up with the potential viewer. This occured when seeking feedback from people had viewed our property, too.

We didn’t find this a problem, the benefits of having an online system as the primary contact method far outweighed the negatives. However, if you opt for Yopa you will need to be prepared to do some of the communicating with viewers directly.

Yopa Hub Viewings

It took us a few months to sell but that was down to a few reasons. Firstly we listed just before Christmas, a time when the market typically slows down.

Secondly, our house had an unconventional layout which didn’t appeal to many people. We knew that because when we bought the property it had been on and off the market for 2 years!

For us to sell at the asking price with Yopa within 4 months actually felt very quick, especially given our property was too expensive to appeal to most first-time buyers.

The negotiation for the sale was pretty smooth. In fact, it happened just like it would with a high street agent. Our local agent negotiated for us over the phone then lodged the offer in the online system for us to login and accept.

Yopa Hub Accepted Offer

So far, so good! We got a fantastic property listing live on all the portals within a few days of meeting our local yopa agent in person. We had viewing requests almost immediately and accepted an offer for our asking price faster than we thought!

What about seeing the accepted offer through to a completed sale? Well, it was OK but could have been better.

In fairness, we were still in the midst of the COVID pandemic and there was a rush to beat the stamp duty deadline. All estate agents, online and offline, were struggling with demand.

But, we did feel like we could have had more support from Yopa. In the end, it didn’t matter to us too much as we wanted to handle a lot of the sale progression ourselves (call us control freaks if you must!!).

We’re sure Yopa would have been there if we had needed them but it’s certainly something to keep in mind. Yopa can save you a LOT of money and are comparable to high street estate agents in many ways, but be prepared to do more of the chasing yourself.

This does have its own advantages, with both us and our buyer communicating directly, we felt like our sale completed much more quickly than if we had been relying on our respective estate agents.

All in all, we were happy with our experience of Yopa.There’s no doubt they aren’t for everyone. If you want a completely hands-off experience, you’ll be better off paying the higher fees of a good high street estate agent.

Otherwise, if you want to save hundreds, perhaps even thousands of pounds and don’t mind doing a little more of the communication yourself, Yopa are a great choice.

How Do Yopa Compare To Other Estate Agents?

Naturally, when looking at any product or service, you need to be comparing them to the competition to find out if they’re the best option out there.

With that in mind, let’s use our Yopa review to take a look at how Yopa stack up against your other options…

Yopa vs Purplebricks

Ah, Purplebricks, perhaps the best-known estate agent in the country thanks to a massive advertising campaign over the past few years.

That means they have the brand recognition that should help reassure potential buyers that you’re a serious seller. However, Yopa aren’t too far behind now thanks to their innovative ad campaigns.

In terms of price, there’s not much to choose between them. While Purplebricks offer a free package, most people will opt for one of their paid packages. The Boost package is the nearest in terms of what’s included compared to Yopa’s standard package.

There’s not much difference in price between them when you isolate these packages with Purplebricks edging it at £100 less. In both of these cases though, you’ll have to take the risk of paying upfront.

If you want a ‘pay on completion’ option where the risk is all on the estate agent, Yopa is the only option since Purplebricks do not offer ‘no sale, no fee’ at all.

You can see our full Yopa vs Purplebricks comparison for more details.

Ultimately for us, we didn’t even really consider Purplebricks as a viable alternative to Yopa simply because we were only interested in a ‘pay on completion’ service. At the time, Purplebricks didn’t even offer their free package so were never a serious contender for us.

Put simply, we weren’t confident we could sell at our asking price so we preferred the safer (but £1k more expensive!) option of using Yopa and only paying upon the completion of the sale.

Yopa vs Other Online Estate Agents

So, that’s the key online agents compared in this Yopa review. But, what about the rest?

Well, undoubtedly there are cheaper options out there. Yopa are not a low cost online agent, neither on their upfront or ‘no sale, no fee’ pricing. However, lower priced online estate agents rarely offer the level of service you’ll find at Yopa.

When we were listing our home, we considered a few other online estate agents but none really stood out as reliable alternatives to Yopa.

Therefore, for most people, Yopa will be worth the extra cost. Especially as you still stand to save over if you went with a traditional estate agent. Speaking of which…

Yopa Review - Online Estate Agent

Yopa vs High Street Estate Agents

There’s one last thing we want to cover in this part of our Yopa review. How do they compare to traditional estate agents? Well, the price is the obvious one. While more high street agents are adopting similar fees to online agents, most still do not offer an upfront fee option.

That means most people stand to save money by going with Yopa and, therefore, they’re the better option. However, you should factor in that Yopa won’t do viewings for you (unless you choose it as an add-on).

We feel that most people can sell their house better than an estate agent and so this shouldn’t be an issue, however, we realise it won’t sit well with everyone.

Yet, when selling our home, we didn’t just dismiss high street agents out of hand. We actually had valuation visits from two local high street agents in addition to the two online agents (Yopa & Strike) that we used.

Surprisingly, we found that the high street agents lacked in some of the knowledge that the online agents did. For instance, one high street agent recommended we listed our home at £499,950.

This is actually bad advice as it would mean it wouldn’t show up for anyone searching the property portals for properties starting at £500,000. Rather than miss out on a whole batch of potential buyers, it’s much better to list at amounts that match the filters commonly used on portals.

So, our whole valuation experience was much better with the online agents, and the representative from Yopa who visited our home proved to be very knowledgeable, so we went with them (the fees also worked out much less too – bonus!).

How Much Does Yopa Cost?

Yopa have a fixed-fee price from just £999 which is payable up-front, however, there is an interest-free option to pay the fee in 10 months time you prefer. While the lower price was tempting, we opted to use the ‘no sale, no fee’ offer instead for extra security.

One thing to be aware of though is that some London postcodes have a higher fee. Regardless, as part of the fee you’ll get…

  • Professional photographs
  • Detailed floor plan
  • Listings on Rightmove, Zoopla, and more
  • ‘For Sale’ board
  • Dedicated local estate agent
  • Online viewing schedule
  • Communicate directly with buyers
  • Full support through to completion
  • ‘YopaHub’ platform to manage everything

As far as packages go, the Yopa package does include everything you would expect (not just your basic property advert), plus a couple of nice additions such as the ability to communicate directly with your prospective buyers.

As of early 2018, Yopa began offering a ‘No Sale, No fee’. This was the option we went for when selling our Nottingham home.

This is still in operation (as of February, 2024), though there are now also ‘Premium’ (£1,499) and ‘Ultimate’ (£1,999) options too if you pay upfront. These include extras such as hosted viewings and listing upgrades.

While it’s fairly uncommon, Yopa do occasionally issue discount codes. When there is one available, you’ll find it on our Yopa voucher code page. We weren’t able to use a voucher code when we used Yopa but we found the price was very competitive even without one.

Yopa Comparison

Yopa Add-Ons:

When selling our property as part of our Yopa review, we found the following added extras were available:

  • Viewings Package (£300)
  • Premium Listings (From £99)
  • Energy Performance Certificate (£99)
  • Featured Property Listing (£149)

Both the viewings package and premium listings upgrade are included in the ‘Premium’ version of each package. If you want both of these add-ons, getting them through the ‘Premium’ upgrade will save you money.

As we already had a valid EPC from when we bought our house, we didn’t need that add on. We were also comfortable doing our own reviews and that was convenient as we worked from home so we skipped the hosted viewings add-on too.

We were much more tempted by the featured and premium listing add-ons though. Like most people, we wanted to sell as quickly as possible and so they certainly had appeal.

In the end, we opted against them at the start as we knew, if we struggled to attract interest in our property, we could always add them on at a later date. As it was, we didn’t need to as the way Yopa marketed our property attracted lots of interest, despite the pandemic!

We should also mention that prices were correct at the time of writing our Yopa review (January, 2023). Please check the Yopa website for any changes to add-on options.

One of the main disadvantages of online estate agents is you usually have to perform all the viewings yourself which can be tricky if you lead a busy lifestyle.

Yopa solve this by offering a viewings package which passes all the management and conducting of viewings over to them so you don’t need to worry about it. This helps bridge the gap towards a more traditional estate agency service whilst still keeping the costs considerably lower.

As we say, we didn’t opt for this service so cannot comment on how good it is, but on the surface it appears pretty good value for money.

The Energy Performance Certificate is priced a little high, but, like us, you may not need this if your property has had one issued in the last 10 years. You can check if your property has a valid EPC at the EPC Register.

How Selling With Yopa Works:

So, what about the selling process? Unlike some online estate agents, you cannot instruct Yopa to sell your property until you have had them carry out a free valuation of your property for you. Therefore, the first step is always to book your free valuation through the Yopa website.

The valuation is performed by a property agent with local knowledge and they’ll also use the opportunity to explain Yopa to you in more detail.

Our agent was called Raj and was very friendly and respectful of our property and immediately made us feel at ease. He took the time to look around our property and was able to clearly communicate who he felt it would appeal to and the best way of marketing it.

When he got on to the valuation, he was able to give us good reasoning as to why he came up with the price he did. He also was open to our suggestions in terms of the way we wanted to present our home and our pricing strategy.

Once you instruct Yopa you’ll need to either pay the upfront fee in full or sign an agreement to pay the fee in 10 months time (regardless of whether your property sells or not). If you opt for the ‘no sale, no fee’ package as we did, you’ll sign a contract that ties you into paying the fee on completion.

Your Yopa agent will then create your advert using professional photos and a detailed floorplan. You’ll get to approve the advert before it goes live on sites like Rightmove, Zoopla, and PrimeLocation. Unless you have chosen the viewings package add-on, you’ll then manage all your viewings via the YopaHub online platform.

The photos that our Yopa agent took were fantastic and he really went the extra mile to make sure the presentation of our home was first class (he even removed toilet rolls from the bathroom!).

We were able to discuss with him which photo should be the featured one as we had several potential options depending on the kind of buyer we wanted to attract. When we wanted to try a different one later on, he had no problem making the change for us.

You’ll get an alert once an offer has been received and you can communicate directly with your buyer or allow your agent to handle the negotiation.

We opted to let our Yopa agent do most of the negotiation for us and we ended up very much at a price we were happy with.

Once the sale is agreed, the Yopa team will keep in touch and support you to the successful completion of your sale!

While, in our experience, we felt the support team could have done more to keep in touch and progress the sale, we were just coming out of another lockdown so we’ll give the team some benefit of doubt.

However, we do feel that it’ll help if you’re happy to get involved in pushing your solicitor and talking to your buyer yourself to help keep things moving along. That’s what we did and it worked well for us.

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How Accurate Are Yopa’s Valuations?

This is a really good question. The question with all online agents is whether they have the local knowledge needed to price up properties based on a true market value and therefore give an accurate valuation.

It’s something that’s very difficult to figure out as the property portals don’t usually show much in the way of price history (which would help indicate if an agent was overvaluing properties).

As far as we have been able to tell during our Yopa review, there do not appear to be any major issues with Yopa valuations and how they reflect the actual property value.

Their own website actually claims that, on average, people selling with them achieve over 96% of the asking price.

However, as with any agent, we’d always recommend getting at least two other valuations to check none of the agents seem too out of line with the others.

How Long Does It Take To Sell A Property With Yopa?

Another great question and another difficult one to answer with any certainty. That’s because it can vary so much from one property to another. The property condition, area, and market can alll make a property sell quicker or slower.

For us, it took us 4 months to accept an offer. However, we listed at the worst time (just before Christmas), had a lockdown mid-way through, had an unconvential property layout that put off some buyers, and we were trying to push our asking price a little too high (against the advice of our Yopa agent).

So, even though 4 months isn’t a long time, our experience was probably a little more lengthy than most.

After accepting our offer, it took a further 3 months to actually complete which is pretty standard – in fact, for a property with a chain involved, it’s pretty fast!

Yopa do claim that they sell houses 17% faster than the average estate agent. That’s a pretty significant amount and suggests that Yopa are one of the faster selling agents around. Our experience certainly didn’t disprove this and shows it may well be true.

Yopa Reviews From Customers:

Yopa made selling are house nice and easy to sell. Aimee cook could not do enough to help things go smoothly and got us a great price and the up front fee works out a lot cheaper than the established estate agents in are area sold in the first week would definitely recommend Yopa

Michael P via 5-star Trustpilot review

From start to finish, offered a genuinely first rate service with local experience and customer focus to achieve the best results and talk frankly about the process. Can’t believe the price this was achievable for!

Geoffrey Howard via 5-star Trustpilot review

Any Yopa Bad Reviews To Be Aware Of?

Naturally, as with any estate agent there are both positive and negative Yopa reviews around. On the whole, the positive reviews far outweigh the negatives. Especially as a lot of the negative reviews appear to be from disgruntled buyers or staff and therefore aren’t necessarily a reflection of Yopa’s selling service.

Overall, we say no reason why the negative Yopa reviews should put you off. There aren’t enough of them, and they don’t raise enough red flags to seriously concern us.

So, Is Yopa Any Good?

Our Yopa review has found that Yopa offer an all round good service with a genuine commitment to providing a good customer experience. This is backed up by a 5-star rating on TrustPilot from over 20,000 reviews.

The fixed fee from £999 may not be the cheapest out there but you do get a lot for your money including a ‘For Sale’ board and access to the YopaHub online platform. It’s also great to know that there is the added option to have a local agent conduct your viewings for you should you lead a busy lifestyle.

Yopa claim that the average person who sold using them found a buyer in under 29 days. This is very fast and also gives a good indication as to why they have so many positive reviews.

While we found it took us a little longer to sell with Yopa, there were reasons for this that weren’t Yopa’s fault. Overally, our experience with Yopa was extremely positive and we would have no hesitation in using them again.

Yopa TV Ad:

Negatives Of Yopa:

It took them a while but Yopa do now offer a ‘No Sale, No Fee’ option although the cost in some London postcodes for this option is a fairly pricey £2,695+. This is compared to the £1,999 (approx) they charge most areas for ‘No Sale, No Fee’.

If you’re in London then the standard up-front fee is more for some London postcodes. Whilst this seems a little unfair, it isn’t uncommon for online agents to charge more for certain parts of London. If you’re not in London then don’t worry, the fixed-fee price from £999 is all you’ll pay for the standard service.

Keep in mind too that even if you know how much you want to sell for, you’ll still have to go through the process of having a Yopa agent come down to do their own valuation. This shouldn’t be a major issue but it will lengthen the process slightly.

In terms of our own direct experience of Yopa, we found the one area where improvement could be made is in their attentiveness on the progression of the sale.

Quite frankly, we had to do a lot of the chasing ourselves. That’s something we enjoyed doing since it meant we had some control and always knew what was happening, however, we appreciate it won’t suit everyone.

A Short History Of Yopa:

Savills Invested in Yopa

The name Yopa is a shortened version of ‘Your Property Agent’ and the company began life in 2014 as a purely online estate agent.

Early customers paid a reduced amount simply for Yopa to list them on property sites such as Rightmove and Zoopla (only estate agents can create new listings on these portals).

However, it was quickly realised that people appreciate the human interaction and added expertise a traditional estate agent provides.

That led to Yopa changing the way they do business and rolling out nationally in January 2016 as a full-service online estate agent.

Who Owns Yopa?

Yopa have quickly attracted some big-name investors (including Savills), thanks partly to two of the owners of Yopa being Andrew and Alistair Barclay, the grandson, and son of Sir David Barclay, who owns the Daily Telegraph.

Yopa Review – Summary:

Overall then, our Yopa review has found a very solid online estate agent with plenty to offer anyone who chooses to sell their property with them.

In fact, it’s impressive just how quickly their reputation has grown alongside their 5-star rating on TrustPilot.

The price may not be the cheapest out there but it’s very fair nonetheless and gives you all the expected services and plenty of local knowledge and expertise from your local agent.

There is now a ‘No Sale, No Fee’ pricing option, but if you are serious about selling, the up-front pricing option is very attractive as Yopa do have a great track record at finding buyers quickly.

What’s really nice is that if you don’t want to spend the time conducting your own viewings, you can add on the package to have Yopa manage and conduct viewings for you. This saves you a great deal of time and stress.

We were able to successfully sell our own home with Yopa and felt they did an excellent job from the valuation right through to the offer negotiation. We sold relatively quickly and at a more than fair price.

Much of this was down to the expertise of our Yopa agent who was very knowledgeable and took some excellent photographs of our home.

The one area they could have improved in was the sales progression, but in fairness, the progression team were working from due to the pandemic and probably weren’t at their most efficient. We expect improvements have probably been made in this area since we sold with Yopa.

Overall then, it’s a very strong agent that comes highly recommended.

Compare Yopa To Other Online Estate Agents

As you’ve seen, our Yopa review has found this to be a very good online estate agent. However, if you’d like to compare them to the other leading online agents, simply select one below:

Strike Reviews
Purplebricks Reviews

Our Top-Rated Online Estate Agents:

Estate AgentCheapest Package'No Sale, No Fee'Our RatingReviewOfficial Site
Yopa Estate Agent£999£1,999
9.6
Read ReviewVisit Website
Purplebricks ReviewsFREEFREE
9.5
Read ReviewVisit Website
Griffin Property Reviews£245From £595
9.2
Read ReviewVisit Website

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Author

  • Paul James

    Paul James, is a marketing expert with a passion for property. As well as being a property investor, Paul has also worked within the marketing departments of some of the UK’s leading estate agents. Paul is the founder of Property Road.

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