Housesimple.co.uk, one of the new breed of online estate agents have just been featured in an article from the Independent 'Property websites: Is this the end of the estate-agent rip-off?'

In the article it mentions they sold a property for £3million recently. It's great to see more evidence of the change happening in estate agency, but I can't quite get my head around the title of this article as the agent still charged 20K for what seems like arranging 5 or 6 viewings.

In my opinion, over £20k commission still counts as a very obvious rip-off. Maybe the title should have been 'Property websites: Is this the beginning of the end of the estate-agent system rip-off?

How can any estate agent justify such a large fee? I mean, does it really cost 10 times as much to sell a £3m property than your average 3 bed semi?

It gets even worse when you realise the buyer most probably came from seeing the property on one of the big property portals which means very little was spent on marketing.

The other issue I have with the title is the 'rip off' bit. Estate agents have had to charge what seem excessive fees for one simple reason:

For every property which sells 2 or 3 don't, and their marketing costs have to come from somewhere. This means when you sell, you're not only paying your marketing costs, your also paying the marketing costs of complete strangers houses, which don't sell.

Add in expensive high street offices which are now secondary to the internet and ineffective, out-of-date advertising and it's easy to realise why estate agents HAVE to charge so much.

Surely, if agents moved to less expensive units on the edge of town, stopped wasting money in ineffective local advertising and sellers paid an up front marketing fee of a couple of hundred pounds the situation would turn around immediately.

This would cut out speculative sellers, (people just testing the market), would help pay estate agents' day to day running costs and would also make buyers more confident the seller was serious as they've already forked out some money.

Once a buyer has been found the agent checks the chain, informs solicitors, and then keeps a very close eye on all involved until completion where the seller happily pays the agent a much smaller commission they've EARNED. This fee is for years of experience and knowledge in getting to a successful completion.

I think a good estate agent is worth a couple of grand, don't you?