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When you’re selling your property, it’s of vital importance to know who you’re working with.
This is our independent Upstix review. Our private researchers analysed their company records, strengths and weaknesses.
In here, you’ll find everything you need to know about Upstix and whether you should trust them to sell your property quickly.
Your next step
Once you’ve read our impartial guides, you’re completely free to choose a cash homebuyer and contact them yourself. There’s no obligation to use our introduction service. We’ll be happy to have helped you to find a cash buyer you can trust and stop you being taken for a ride. Our work here is done!
However, we understand that choosing a cash buyer for your home is a big decision, so if you prefer, you can break it down into easier steps.
First, click the cash offer calculator button below to see how much cash buyers offer for properties like yours. It’s completely free to find out, and it only takes a couple of clicks. You don’t have to give any personal information, just an estimated value of your home.
Then, if this figure works for you, simply add a few more details of your home and we’ll connect you with the cash homebuyer we think is best suited to you. There’s no obligation to use this company or accept their offer, but it’s probably as good as you’ll get.
Our recommendation costs you nothing and could even get you a higher offer. The PSW is well-respected within the industry and companies will go all out to prove that they’re worthy of our recommendations, so that we keep sending customers to them.
Click below to start your home selling journey.
Company
Established in
2021
Members of NAPB
Yes
Members of TPO
Yes
Registered with ICO
Yes
Approved by CTSI
Unknown
Will “Upstix” pay all of your legal fees?
No
Do they ask you to sign a contract?
No
Government verified transactions
Yes
Cash offer
- Up to 87%
Average sale time
28 days
Fastest sale time
7 days
Availability
Monday to Friday 9 – 5
Complaints procedure
None stated
Customer service
4 / 5
Google rating
4 / 5
Trustpilot rating
4.2 / 5
Reviews.co.uk rating
N / A
Feefo rating
N / A
Upstix is a relatively new property buyer that claims to have facilitated over 4,000 property transactions worth over £1billion. They provide an instant cash offer and can buy property in as little as seven days.
Unusually, Upstix say they will provide a bonus payment if your property is sold on for more than expected.
- PSW Rating
4.7 / 5
1. Upstix: Company Overview
(source: Companies House)
- Current company (Upstix Technologies Ltd) founded Feb 2021
- Headquarters location: Rutland House, 148 Edmund Street, Birmingham, B3 2JR
- Company number 13180792
- The current directors are: Giles MacKay, Robin Paterson, Caspar Warre
- All the information seems up to date and correct
Upstix is a quick property buying company that claims to be a cash buyer. They have over 25 years of experience and can sell your property as quickly as 7 days, with an average sale time of 28 days.
The company claims to have no additional fees and will even offer a bonus second payment as a profit share if your property is sold on for more than expected. However, unlike many companies, they will not cover your legal fees.
Upstix claim to buy almost any home in any condition, providing the ‘fairest valuation’ with no hidden fees and a dedicated team member to deal with your sale throughout.
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.
Upstix provides free cash offers, doesn’t seem to have estate agent fees, although sellers are responsible for their own conveyancing costs.
This type of sale is perfect for people in a rush, who don’t have time for unnecessary red tape.
2. Upstix: Strengths & Weaknesses
Handling over £1 billion worth of property transactions is a positive sign and shows that the company is serious, experienced and trusted in the marketplace.
Upstix is a direct buyer and has institutionally backed funds available that enable them to act fast. Unlike some other companies, they do not rely on third-party investors, which can be unreliable and unpredictable.
Upstix use smart technology, called iBuyer, to help with their cash offers. They claim that this provides a more accurate valuation. They claim to provide a final offer in 48hours.
However, their terms and conditions make multiple references to ‘indicative, non-binding offers’ and sellers should proceed with caution when accepting such offers as they may be changed later.
You won’t get the full market value of your property, especially when asking for a very fast purchase, but you will sell quickly and easily.
A typical estate agent will take 6-9 months whereas a fast home-selling company can do it in mere days. You’ll be sacrificing a negotiable percentage of cash for an exponential increase in speed-of-sale and a major reduction of headaches and legal complications.
Whether this is right for you will depend on your individual circumstances, and your cash home buyer should explain your options to you without obligation.
Are they NAPB members?
Yes, Upstix has been a member of NAPB since November 2023.
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.
Are they TPO members?
Yes, Upstix is a member of TPO.
Upstix is regulated by TPO and strictly follows a strict ‘Code of Practice for Residential Buying Companies’.
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 Upstix.
Are they Registered With The ICO?
Yes, Upstix have been registered with the ICO since February 2022
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, Upstix is obliged to protect its customers’ data at all times (although data is widely shared as detailed below).
The ICO also has a Free Online Checker where you can verify whether a company is registered with them or not.
Are they GDPR Compliant?
Upstix has an extensive privacy policy that details how and why your data is collected and used. This includes details of how they share (or perhaps sell) your data with ‘trusted service providers’. This may result in unsolicited emails from other companies selling their services.
Upstix also installs cookies, which may install automatically. Although you can choose not to install these, this is not the default setting and you may have to actively block these cookies. Such cookies are used for marketing and re-targeting purposes, such as displaying relevant ads.
The privacy policy outlines your data rights and how to go about exercising such rights.
Do They Have Cash On Hand To Buy The Property?
Upstix claim to have cash on hand from ‘institutional investors’ that enables them to buy properties. They also claim to have bought over £1billion worth of property.
Our team of investigators found one of their investment vehicles within Companies House.
This allowed us to validate that they do have government-verified transactions which is a big plus in their favour. They have 104 transactions registered dating back to July 2021.
They may also be using other company names to track and register their other Companies House transactions.
In general, we’ve discovered that 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.
Have They Traded For More Than 5 Years?
Upstix Technologies Ltd has only been trading since Feb 2021 – although the company may have existed under other names before this.
They claim to have 25 years experience in the industry, although this may be the combined experience of the company officers, rather than the company itself.
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.
What Is Their Average Cash Offer?
Upstix claims to offer between 85% and 90% of your property’s market value. They also offer a further ‘profit sharing’ payment should they go on to sell your house for more than they expected.
In our experience, offers over 80% are unlikely to be genuine, and opening offers in this region, or ‘indicative, non-binding offers’ as Upstix call them, are often revised downwards closer to the sale.
Faster house sales, such as the 7days offered by Upstix, are a bigger risk for the buyer, as they do not have time to complete the full range of surveys and searches required for due diligence. To cover the increased risk, you will normally be offered less for your home if you want to sell this fast.
You may get a better offer if you are prepared to wait a few weeks until the buyer is more certain about your property value.
Getting 70-80% of the market value for your property when working with a fast home selling company is fair.
We’ve discovered that with sub-par home buying companies you’ll often get between 60 – 65% and sometimes even less.
Upstix appears to give 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.
What Is Their Average Sale Time?
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:
Estate agents take on average 6 – 9 months to sell your property.
Auctions take on average 10 weeks to sell your property.
But fast sale companies can take as little as 7 days.
Upstix average sale time is 28 days although they do offer sales in as little as seven days for a lower price.
Charitable Initiatives
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.
All that being said, it’s still important to acknowledge when a company cash home buyer genuinely supports a charitable cause.
We didn’t find any charitable initiatives which Upstix supports. Nevertheless, some companies prefer to donate privately or anonymously rather than stating it publicly.
Anything Else Suspicious?
We didn’t find anything that raises suspicion during our thorough research of Upstix.
Our investigators sifted through all of the data and legal records of Upstix and everything was clean.
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.
Anything Else You Should Know About?
As far as we are aware, Upstix haven’t received any additional awards or prizes.
They haven’t won any competitions either.
There’s nothing more we could add.
3. Upstix: Customer Experience
To assess the overall user experience (UX) of upstix.com we first analysed their website for ease of use and intuitiveness.
There are some obvious spelling errors on the website which could suggest a less than thorough approach (for example in the quote from founder Robin Paterson).
They make it very easy to get a fast ‘indicative offer’ for your property and say that they will confirm this within 48hours.
Also, they have a landline number which you can use to contact the company Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, plus an email address of [email protected].
We calculated their First Response Time (FTR) by messaging them at approximately 2 PM on a non-holiday weekday (on a Friday to be exact) and used a stopwatch to estimate how long it took them to respond.
First Response Time
Upstix responded in 2 minutes and 5 seconds.
Which is much faster than the industry average. And a fast FTR is something we consider highly important, especially in this sector.
A 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.
Client Satisfaction Guarantee
We also asked if they offer some sort of ‘Client Satisfaction Guarantee’, and if yes, what would that guarantee consist of.
They currently don’t offer a Client Satisfaction Guarantee but they’re happy to help resolve any issues and problems, within reason, as soon as possible.
Client Complaints Procedure
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.
Upstix do not have a published complaints procedure on their website, although you can email at any time on [email protected].
Also, you can submit a complaint through The Property Ombudsman because Upstix are a TPO member.
And every TPO member agrees to The Property Ombudsman Code Of Practice which allows customers to file complaints against TPO members, if needed.
Speaking To Past Customers
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.
4. Upstix: Online Presence
In this section, we’ll discuss what the public thinks of Upstix 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 use trained researchers with a sceptical eye to go through Upstix’ social media presence and online reviews.
Customer reviews
- Google Reviews – 4.0 stars (4 reviews) No perceivable signs of fake reviews
- Trustpilot Reviews – 4.2 stars (77 reviews) No perceivable signs of fake reviews
Domain Rating
- Domain Rating (DR) – 69 / 100
- Search Traffic – N/A
Social media presence
- Facebook – 211 Likes; 251 Followers
- Instagram – 919 Followers
- LinkedIn – 640 Followers
Media Mentions
- The Times
- City A.M.
- Property Week
- The Telegraph
- The Sunday Times
TV Channel Features
- N/A
We didn’t find anything suspicious with Upstix social media, TV 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.
The Final Verdict
Upstix is one of the newer cash house buyers, with the current company having only been established in 2021. However, they have handled a huge volume of property worth over £1billion.
We thoroughly examined their strengths and weaknesses, user experience (UX), customer service and overall online presence.
Upstix are members of the NAPB and TPO, and they are registered with the ICO.
They appear to give very generous cash offers of 85% to 90%, although these should be checked very carefully as these kinds of offers are rare and may not end up being honoured.
Upstix do offer to share any profits if the subsequent sale of your home achieves a higher price than expected (although there are no details of how this works in practice).
Upstix don’t appear to have a published complaints procedure but they are registered with the Property Ombudsman.
We will be continuously updating this review as we do with all of our other content. If Upstix decide to alter, amend or modify something, then we’ll make sure to adjust our critique and score accordingly.
Get The Best Cash Offer For Your Property
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.
Once you’ve read our impartial guides, you’re completely free to choose a cash homebuyer and contact them yourself. There’s no obligation to use our introduction service. We’ll be happy to have helped you to find a cash buyer you can trust and stop you being taken for a ride. Our work here is done!
However, we understand that choosing a cash buyer for your home is a big decision, so if you prefer, you can break it down into easier steps.
First, click the cash offer calculator button below to see how much cash buyers offer for properties like yours. It’s completely free to find out, and it only takes a couple of clicks. You don’t have to give any personal information, just an estimated value of your home.
Then, if this figure works for you, simply add a few more details of your home and we’ll connect you with the cash homebuyer we think is best suited to you. There’s no obligation to use this company or accept their offer, but it’s probably as good as you’ll get.
Our recommendation costs you nothing and could even get you a higher offer. The PSW is well-respected within the industry and companies will go all out to prove that they’re worthy of our recommendations, so that we keep sending customers to them.
Click below to start your home selling journey.
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.
Compare Companies
Upstix 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.
Content Updates
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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