The majority of the staff are actually nice, apart from someone who claimed to be the manager. He complained about his own staff to me when someone had been off ill and dismissed any responsibility for fixing the poor service we received, asking for sympathy himself instead. The main issue is that when staff are off, nobody takes over their work. Nobody tells you they are off. So if the person responsible for your sale is off, nothing gets done. It takes lots of chasing to get a call back, so you are left with no progress being made for long periods of time. There were some issues with our sale because of difficulties that the buyer had with the mortgage provider. The buyer used a mortgage broker with Bairstow Eves, so I thought this would have been easy to fix, but it didn't help smooth the process at all, and each phone call ended up being a long chain of relayed messages with little to gain, and things only progressed once I asked the estate agent for the contact details of the mortgage broker, spoke to the mortgage broker, then found the details of the valuer from the mortgage lender and spoke to him directly. This feels like the sort of thing I was paying Bairstow Eves £3600 to do for me. This wasn't an isolated incident, and the same issue was repeated with dealing with issues with the EWS1 form, where after waiting for weeks with no movement I suggested calling the company who was responsible for the certificate, upon which the issue was resolved promptly. Again, this felt like the work I was paying someone else to do for me. Overall, I put in far too much work to justify a £3600 fee. Coupled with the rude emails I received from Countrywide chasing an AML fee that hadn't been paid because initially they had failed to invoice my solicitors, so my solicitors only knew the commission due through me, I would run like hell away from any Countrywide Estage Agents if I ever needed to sell a property again. (Mostly) lovely people, useless organisation.