Looking to sell your property fast but not sure who to trust? Complete our contact form
Looking to sell your property fast but not sure who to trust? Complete our contact form
Critical Analysis:
When you’re selling your property, it’s of vital importance to know who you’re working with.
In here, you’ll find everything you need to know about Smooth Sale and whether you should trust them to sell your property quickly.
Want to hear who we recommend above Smooth Sale?
Company
Established in
2021
Members of NAPB
Yes
Members of TPO
Yes
Registered with ICO
Yes
Approved by CTSI
No
Will “Smooth Sale” pay all of your legal fees?
Yes
Do they ask you to sign a contract?
Yes, always
Government verified transactions
Yes
Cash offer
Average sale time
12 days
Fastest sale time
10 days
Availability
24/7
Complaints procedure
No
Customer service
4.2 / 5
Google rating
4.9 / 5
Trustpilot rating
4.8 / 5
Reviews.co.uk rating
N / A
Feefo rating
N / A
Smooth Sale are rather new in this market, established in 2021, but from our research we can see that they are striving to tick most of the important boxes.
Smooth Sale are NAPB and TPO members, are registered with the ICO and have a few government-verified transactions. They don’t have a formal complaints’ procedure but seem to be available 24/7 via the phone.
4.4 / 5
(source: Companies House)
Smooth Sale is the typical cash home buyer.
Like every other company in our review table, Smooth Sale promises to help you sell your property much quicker than going through an estate agent.
They claim to be fully transparent, honest and to closely support you throughout your entire journey.
Whether all of that’s true, will be revealed in this review.
When working with them, they’ll buy the property from you at a price that satisfies both parties involved, and then sell it for a profit.
You’ll get a slightly below-market price, but you’ll achieve a prompt and effortless sale with little bureaucracy.
Smooth Sale provides free cash offers, doesn’t have estate agent or solicitors fees and guarantees the sale of any property.
They can give you a no-obligation quote in just 24 hours and purchase your property in as little as 10 days.
This type of sale is perfect for people in a rush, who don’t have time for unnecessary red tape.
It’s important to remember:
You won’t get the full market value of your property but you’ll sell it very fast.
In fact, this is by far the fastest way to sell. A typical estate agent will take 6-9 months whereas a fast home-selling company can do it in mere days.
You’re sacrificing a negotiable percentage of cash for an exponential increase in speed-of-sale and a major reduction of headaches and legal complications.
Smooth Sale offers customers a way to sell their homes quickly without any fees.
There’s nothing revolutionary going on here. All cash home buyers in the UK, promise the same things.
The question is – what exactly differentiates Smooth Sale from the rest?
On their website, Smooth Sale claims that their team is made up of genuine property experts who have a deep understanding of the market. And that they get a lot of word-of-mouth referrals because they can always guarantee a sale in suitable timeframe, if your property is approved.
But now, let’s look at the facts.
Yes, Smooth Sale is a member of NAPB.
The National Association of Property Buyers (NAPB) was specifically set up to protect homeowners looking to sell their houses for cash to a property buying company.
The NAPB continuously screens its members in order to see whether they’re maintaining the necessary business integrity, legality, professionalism, and customer service.
It’s mandatory for all NAPB members to also register with The Property Ombudsman (TPO) and abide by the TPO ‘Code Of Practice For Residential Buying Companies’.
However, being an NAPB member itself, is completely voluntary. Nobody forces these cash home buyers to become members, they do it of their own volition.
Yes, Smooth Sale is a member of TPO.
The Property Ombudsman (TPO) defends the interests of the public by investigating and addressing complaints of maladministration or a violation of rights.
It has been providing consumers and property agents with an alternative dispute resolution service since 1990.
TPO has a specific category for fast home sale companies, such as Smooth Sale.
These companies have to adhere to a strict ‘Code of Practice for Residential Buying Companies’.
Smooth Sale is regulated by TPO and strictly follows the above mentioned TPO code of conduct.
This is another noteworthy feather in their cap.
Yes, Smooth Sale have been registered with the ICO since 23 June 2021.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the UK’s independent regulatory body set up to uphold information rights.
The ICO also governs all forms of data collection and advertising intelligence.
By being registered with the ICO, Smooth Sale has to protect its customers’ data at all times.
The ICO also has a free online checker where you can verify whether a company is registered with them or not.
They are somewhat GDPR-compliant.
From our independent investigation, we discovered that www.SmoothSale.co.uk is doesn’t ask for consent prior to loading other than strictly necessary cookies. And they don’t ask for consent prior to collecting personal data.
But www.SmoothSale.co.uk doesn’t transmit personal data to ‘inadequate countries’ (GDPR).
And we didn’t find any other risks of personal data breaches.
We’re unsure whether Smooth Sale have cash on hand, which they use to buy your property.
They do have a few government-verified transactions, but based on the information we see on their website, they seem to solely rely on a network of investors to buy their customers’ properties.
Inferring from this, we can’t say for certain whether Smooth Sale have cash on hand, but they seem to mention that indirectly on their website, which is commendable.
Very few fast home-buying companies actually have disposable cash on hand.
Most of them are unregulated small businesses or worse – individual opportunists pretending to be big organisations who deliberately mislead.
These companies don’t have their own cash, but attempt to raise funds by low-balling their offer and getting finance off the back of the difference between their offer and the market value.
For this reason, it’s less risky to work with home buying companies that have government verified transactions.
And based on our independent research, Smooth Sale seem genuine and have government-verified transactions, but proceed with caution.
No, Smooth Sale have not traded for more than 5 years.
We use the ‘over/under 5 years trading time’ as a metric to gauge whether a company is an established entity with a lot of experience under their belt or just a newly founded business that may have ulterior motives.
Not all newly formed companies are scams, but it’s still important to check how long they have traded.
If they’ve traded for more than 5 years, then this is a minor but still a notable vote of confidence.
And it needs to be acknowledged.
The average cash offer of SmoothSale.co.uk is approx. 70-80% of the market value.
And Smooth Sale don’t seem to have any hidden fees or charges.
So just like many other cash home buyers in the UK, Smooth Sale covers these fees on your behalf, which is one of the reasons why you get below market-value price for your property.
But the good thing is that you know right from the start, how much you’ll get at the end.
Unlike traditional estate agents who claim to give you market-value prices, but you later realise that you must pay a plethora of fees.
This is how their selling process works:
Getting 70-80% of your property’s market value is the norm in this cash buying industry.
But you can get more than that if you go with a more customer-centric house buyer.
Inferring from this, SmoothSale.co.uk gives reasonable offers in the context of fast home selling companies.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that every home achieves that kind of valuation, as it depends on a myriad of factors. Sometimes there are justifiable reasons why you may receive a lower offer.
According to the latest Statista research, the average number of days taken to sell property in UK from September 2018 to November 2020 is 65 days.
This includes selling properties via estate agents, actions, fast-sale companies and everything else under the sun.
Again, this graph represents every single method of selling a property, combined together.
And because of the vast number of fast home sale companies in the UK, this number is considerably lower than what it would’ve been if it only were estate agents and actions.
Remember when it comes to speed of sale, nothing beats a quick home buying company:
Smooth Sale’s average sale time is 12 days, but they can help you sell even quicker than that.
Remember:
With a quick home-buying company, you’re sacrificing a negotiable percentage of cash for an exponential increase in speed-of-sale and a major reduction of headaches and legal complications.
That’s why you need to carefully consider your options.
Do you want a bit more money or do you want a significantly faster sale?
Supporting a charity is by no means proof that the home buying company in question is necessarily ‘good’.
In fact, dodgy home buying companies might purposefully support and/or pretend to support a charity just to win brownie points and credibility in the eyes of the customer.
We didn’t find any charitable initiatives on Smooth Sale’s website.
We didn’t find anything that raises suspicion during our thorough research of SmoothSale.co.uk
However, we’ll redact this paragraph at the first glimpse of dodgy practices.
We never stop researching, and our unbending commitment to excellence doesn’t waver.
This paragraph is only valid up until the ‘Last Updated’ date of this review, which can be found at the top of this page.
As far as we are aware, Smooth Sale haven’t received any additional awards or prizes.
They haven’t won any competitions either.
There’s nothing more we could add.
To assess the overall user experience (UX) of SmoothSale.co.uk, we first analysed their website for ease of use and intuitiveness.
They make it very easy to get a free quote/cash offer for your property within 24 hours or less.
Also, they have a phone number which you can call 24/7.
We calculated their First Response Time (FTR) by messaging them at approximately 11 AM on a non-holiday weekday (on a Wednesday to be exact) and used a stopwatch to estimate how long it took them to respond.
They don’t have a live chat features, so we couldn’t estimate their First Response Time (FTR).
A fast FTR is something we consider highly important, especially in this sector.
Because faster response time suggests that the home-selling company is better equipped to deal with customer queries.
And if they’re better equipped to deal with customer queries, then it means they’re investing their resources where it matters the most.
We couldn’t find whether they offer some sort of ‘Client Satisfaction Guarantee’.
But since they claim to be fully transparent and honest, we don’t see why they won’t help you resolve any issues you may have, within reason, as soon as possible.
Also, they did go out of their way and offered additional help and advice which warrants acknowledgement.
In this turbulent market, a fast home buying company should preferably have a formal complaints procedure on their website, where clients can express any disagreements, issues or just plain dissatisfaction with the overall service.
By having such a complaints procedure in place, the home buying company shows that they are willing to listen and if possible, rectify any problems that may arise.
A legitimate quick home buying company that does what it promises shouldn’t have a problem letting you speak to their past customers.
Of course they need to have the permission of the individual involved and provide some kind of proof that it is a genuine past client of theirs.
We strongly encourage all our readers to ask to speak to a past client.
In this section, we’ll discuss what the public thinks of Smooth Sale and what online reviews the company has received.
Keep in mind that online reviews can be easily faked.
It works both ways.
The company in charge might hire fake review writers to write positive reviews.
Or on the other hand, their competitors might hire fake review writers to write negative reviews and tarnish the said company’s reputation.
Also, social media followers can be artificially inflated.
That’s why we deem this section as purely anecdotal.
Nonetheless, we used trained researchers with a sceptical eye to go through Smooth Sale’s social media presence and online reviews. You can see the results below.
We also investigated their Domain Rating (DR) and Search traffic (ST) to see if there’s anything shady.
The Domain Rating is an internet metric that shows the strength of a website.
The longer a website has been online, generally the more other websites link back to it.
These are called backlinks. Backlinks are like a minor vote of confidence.
In simple terms, the more backlinks a website has, the higher their Domain Rating will be.
We scan a company’s backlink profile to see what other websites link back to it.
And we look for unusual, shady patterns or an artificially inflated domain rating.
We didn’t find anything even remotely suspicious with Smooth Sake. Therefore, they pass this test.
The Search Traffic is an internet metric that shows approximately how many unique visitors a given website has per month. And also shows what “words” that website is most known for, i.e. keywords.
We analyse the search traffic and keywords of each house buyer that we review.
We look for any spam or deliberate manipulation of Google’s algorithm.
More search traffic isn’t necessarily better. It all depends on how that traffic is acquired. We can immediately sniff out any dodgy practices.
There was nothing that raised suspicion when analysing Smooth Sale. Hence, they also pass this test.
We didn’t find anything suspicious with Smooth Sale’s social media and online presence, nor with their customer reviews.
We also didn’t find anything suspicious with their domain rating and backlink profile, nor their unique monthly search traffic.
Smooth Sale are new in this market, but they do pass some of our checks.
We found a few government-verified transactions, but based on their selling model where they connect you with one of their investors, we can’t be sure whether Smooth Sale have cash on hand.
We thoroughly examined their strengths and weaknesses, user experience (UX), customer service and overall online presence.
Smooth Sale are members of the NAPB and TPO, and they are registered with the ICO.
They give decent cash offers.
Their website isn’t fully GDPR friendly, so proceed with caution when entering your personal details.
Smooth Sale does not have a formal complaints procedure but if you have an issue with them, you can always speak with The Property Ombudsman.
We will be continuously updating this review (as we do with all of our other content) and if Smooth Sale fix any of the issues mentioned here, we’ll make sure to adjust our critique and score accordingly.
We’ve independently investigated all the UK’s top fast home buyers with our cast-iron 18 point checklist.
And by using the free Safe Connect™ programme we’ll introduce you to our most recommended & strictly vetted home buyer.
The Safe Connect™ programme was created to ensure you not only get the best possible, genuine cash offer, but also to protect you in this unregulated market.
If you click the orange button below, we’ll automatically Safe Connect you to the best property buyer in the UK – as vetted by our team of investigators. And most importantly, you’ll see exactly why we objectively classified them as the best property buyer in the UK.
If you use the Safe Connect™ programme to connect with a cash home buyer, we’ll personally hold them accountable. We’ll ensure they go the extra mile and treat you like a VIP.
The Safe Connect™ programme is a free service. There are no additional fees or costs on your end.
Safe Connect™ ensures there will be no last-minute price drops and no nasty surprises. It’s quick, easy and it eliminates all headaches.
Our strictly vetted partner will know that you’re coming through Property Sale Watchdog and they won’t dare to mess you around.
Smooth Sale is just one of the many fast home-buying companies in the UK.
In order to make sure you choose the right one, it’s best if you compare them all.
Look at their strengths & weaknesses, their pros & cons and make an informed decision.
It’s essential to know you’re in safe hands, that’s why we’re here to help.
Use our company comparison table to find a reliable and trustworthy service, and decide whether expediting the sale of your property is the right thing for you.
This review is being constantly screened by our investigator team and will be corrected in line with the emergence of new evidence.
If a company contacts us with a genuine and verifiable piece of information which supports their cause, then we’ll immediately redact the review and point to the new information.
On the other hand, if we discover that a company which we’ve previously praised for a certain industry trait, starts to dabble in dodgy practices, we’ll also redact the review immediately.
We’ll point to our new findings and we’ll adjust the table metrics and scores accordingly.
For this reason, make sure to take notice of the ‘last updated’ date at the top of this page.
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