Selling Without an Estate Agent

[googler]

Originally Posted by Oli

I have done some research into these sites and found a few of them including Sell4Less, PropertyLadder, BuyItPrivately and MyPropertyForSale. ...

... hear customer feedback or other genuine potential customers who have been doing their research.

What have these sites got for sale in your local area?

My 'customer research' tells me that;

Sell4less have 20 properties for sale in my locale; but none of them are actually listed on sell4less, and were picked up by sell4less from propertyfinder, and they all seem to be for sale by agents who also have their own websites.

propertyladder just seems to be a 'link farm' with no properties listed, unless I've mis-typed it.

BuyItPrivately has nothing for sale in my county - "Your search returned no results. " they say....

mypropertyforsale - again, I searched for my home county - "0 houses found. Sorry."


My approach to research is - what have they got for sale in my home territory? If they haven't got very much, why would a buyer look there in preference to looking where the majority of homes are listed? If I was a buyer, would I look there?

If I'm selling, why would I place my property with these sites, when there's no evidence that anyone will go there to look at my property?

In comparison, without much effort, I can look at the 'traditional' agents in my area that Chris seems to think don't offer very much, and find that they have almost 1000 properties listed, possibly more. No contest.

[StephanB]

There are many help out there to sell your home. Saintsbury website offers a free service for energy certificates. Do a search.

Best is to sell privately.

[googler]

How does a free energy certificate help you to sell your home?

"Best is to sell privately"

Best it is why?

[googler]

Over at another website forum, the proprietor of movingkepsimple.com posted this, in mid-July -

"The High Street Agents demise has been on the cards for years. (snip) We started our Internet only Estate Agent - movingkeptsimple.com just 3 weeks ago and have already had great feedback. Our fees are much lower, we give massive exposure ... (snip) ... too many wanabees have sprung up over the last 5 years. ... (snip) ... So if you want to sell your home with a traditional agent without the traditional fees visit us at www.movingkeptsimple.com, make a move in the right direction."

So, they started the site in early July, promised a lot, but on their homepage now;

"Taylor-a-home Limited trading as movingkeptsimple.com has ceased trading from August 31st 2008"

Hmmm. Whose demise is 'on the cards' now?

[bassboy76]

Hi guys, great debate! I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring an give you my experiences as I've done a lot of research in to the issue.

Point 1 - Finding Buyers:
Virtually everyone starts their house hunting efforts these days online at the major property portals. So if you want your house to be seen by buyers then your property needs to be featured on a major property portal.

What are the major property portals? Good question. Here are the latest portal stats available (from Dec 08 edition of Estate Agency News)...

Fish4Home - 603,283 (monthly unique visitors)
Digital Property Group (Primelocation / Findaproperty) - 3,729,453 (monthly unique visitors)
PropertyFinderGroup (HotProperty /PropertyFinder / UKpropertyshop) - 3,000,000 (monthly unique visitors)
Rightmove - 6,295,036 (monthy unique visitors)
ThinkProperty - 1,606,743 (monthly unique visitors)

So as we can see from above Rightmove is far and away the most used portal in the UK. The lesson here is that if you want to find a traditional house hunter, your best chance of doing that is by having your property on Rightmove.

Point 2: Which Website to Use.
As mentioned by others, there are literally hundreds of private sale websites out there. The big problem with them is that they don't give you access to Rightmove. Rightmove don't let them (after all their core client base is estate agents. Their interests need to be protected). The best the private websites such as LittleHouseCompany etc... can do is get you on Fish4Homes. If you look at the visitor stats above you can make up your own mind as to whether that's worth doing.

The is another type of website to consider though and that is "Online Estate Agents". These webservices are cut-price estate agencies - no offices, no viewings etc...but crucially they are registered as estate agents and as such are able to upload properties to Rightmove. They typically charge £250 - £500 for doing this and will come and take photos and give you help with the valuation of your property.

In a healthy market I personally think is the best value for money way of marketing a property. In the current market though I'm not sure what's best. Buyers can't get mortgages so really estate agents, online estate agents & private sale websites are all pretty hit or miss. Cash buyers are an option but they only buy at a discount of around 30% and auction is about the same.

Point 3: Legals
You don't need a solicitor to handle your sale but when you consider that a good one can be found on a "no sale no fee" basis for under £300 (fixed fee all inclusive) and they have professional indemnity insurance when you don't then I really can see that the hassle of conveyancing is worth tackling alone. At any rate if you have a mortgage that needs to be redeemed your lender will insist that a solicitor be involved. If you don't have one the lender will choose one and make you pay. You can bet your bottom dollar they'll make you pay more than £300.

Anyway, must get on with some work now. Hope my ramblings have given some food for thought.

[googler]

"Virtually everyone starts their house hunting efforts these days online at the major property portals"

..and the proof of this is where, exactly?

"So as we can see from above Rightmove is far and away the most used portal in the UK. The lesson here is that if you want to find a traditional house hunter, your best chance of doing that is by having your property on Rightmove."

Hmm... not necessarily - whilst they have the largest reach for the UK as a whole, I'm not really too bothered about the traffic they get outside my local area. Most folks move within a small radius (yes, I know I'm not citing my source for this - later, maybe), and whilst Rightmove might get loads of traffic within London or Birmingham, say, that's of no interest to me if I'm selling within Scotland, as those browsing it in Birmingham are most likely looking for property in and around Birmingham.

Also of relevance is the number of properties the portals currently have listed in my local area compared to the estate agents herein. As mentioned above, Rightmove hardly have anything listed in my home county, apart from developers such as Barrett, Taylor Woodrow, Redrow, etc .... very little in the way of established housing stock, the majority of which is listed on the local estate agents' sites (who seem to use the portals as an addition to their own websites, rather than the primary web presence).

If the general public have the same perception as me; i.e. there's hardly any listings at a particular portal, so I'm not gonna look there; then as a seller, I'd see little point in placing my own property there (if I were to sell it)

[Richard Webster]

Part of the problem with advertising on an internet sales site is that you might find a buyer (leaving aside all the issues discussed above about the difficulties of getting on Rightmove and people not seeing your proeprty because they have not looked at Fish4Homes) but that isn't all that is needed.

1. Make sure buyer can proceed and isn't a time waster. Can he really get a mortgage? Has he got a complete chain below him? Are there any problem properties in the chain, e.g a flat with a short lease whose buyer will realsie in a month's time that he will be taken to the cleaners by his freeholder for a lease extension and so decides to pull out? The average seller won't necessarily know the kinds of questions to ask. A good estate agent should do.

2. Make sure the chain holds togetehr and the transaction actually exchanges. If you are not doing this all the time you don't know the things that can go wrong - you wouldn't necessarily spot the first signs of trouble.

Some estate agents are awful and haven't got a clue - but there are plenty of good ones who know what can go wrong and try to stop it happening.

I can say this as I get absolutely no recommendations for conveyancing from local estate agents, but that deosn't later the validity of my point.

As a conveyancing solicitor I believe the information given in the message to be useful but I accept no liability except to fee-paying clients

[will davis]

Further to googler 90% of people looking to buy use the internet! These sites use the likes of rightmove! I sold one of my rental properites for 120 quid! see urbansalesandletttings . co . uk

Originally Posted by googler

Some people; usually those who have set up a new 'property sales' website; would have you believe that you can
"Sell your Home Privately and SAVE thousands in agents fees !!" and
"List YOUR property on the net with (name website here). Reach 3 MILLION buyers .... advertise with us privately and SAVE a fortune in (estate agents') fees."

Almost every property discussion forum such as this has a posting somewhere from someone who has set up one of these sites, and is touting for customers. I looked at the one that I copy/pasted the above text from, put in the first two characters of my postcode to see what they had, and there were TWO properties listed. I know that there's thousands listed in this area with the established agencies, so it has to be asked; where are people going to look when they want to find a home? Will it be the established places (aka estate agents) with their majority holding, or this place with two properties for sale?

Sometimes what you're paying for when you hire an estate agent is access to someone the agent spoke to the day before; that person who's looking for a house just like yours. Or the person who viewed a property like yours a month or two ago and who is still looking. How are you going to find these people?

If you put your house up on the internet yourself, whether with a site like the one above, or your own, how are you going to pull people in from the high street? The folks who come to your town, and look in the agents' windows? You could put postcards in the newsagents' windows, but will the property hunters be looking there, or in the estate agents' windows?

What are you going to do for print advertising? You could put an ad in the property section of your local paper, in the property section, but isn't it going to look a bit lost in amongst (I assume) your local agents' larger adverts....?

This isn't the guide you were after, I know.

[googler]

Further to Will Davis! First post, and you're ALREADY promoting a website! Your website, perhaps!?!?!? Do you always talk in this excitable manner?!?!

Can I drop the exclamation marks now, they're starting to hurt....

Like I said, the oft-quoted statistic is that 90% of current buyers START their search on the internet; that doesn't mean it's the only method they use, just the first one, or the starting point. Can anyone prove or provide evidence to support this 90% figure that everyone quotes....?

You sold one for £120? My, that was a cheap property..... even I could afford that.....

urbansales uses rightmove, eh? You sold one property through them?

I just looked at urbansales, and there's ONE listing there. I searched all areas, and it's only got one listing for sale.

Why on earth would I, or anyone else, place a property for sale there? Nobody's gonna look at it.

As I said in another thread, the majority of properties for sale in my neck of the woods aren't on rightmove, they aren't on the small start-up websites like this one that feed into rightmove, they're listed with what some folk would call the 'traditonal agents' - and they're on the traditional agents' websites, in far greater quantity than on urbansales.

[self-sale]

Originally Posted by Bon Bon

Amongst the confusion over the house market madness it seems more and more people are choosing to sell their house online without an estate agent. Now hopefully people won't think I am being thick asking this but I don't quite understand how this is possible.

From my understanding, when selling a house you need a hips pack, is there any nationwide HIP's providers who allow you to order a HIP's pack online?

With that in mind, all one would need in order to sell their house therefore is a HIP's pack and a solicitor to sign over the land ownership once a suitable buyer is found through some form of marketing. If somebody could run me through this from the very first step to the very last step, or provide me with a link to a resource online that explains the very question then I would be most grateful.

With less buyers out there it is necessary to market your property to the maximum and this is very difficult without an agent. Most buyers search for property on rightmove and private sellers can't list on there.
My advice is to use an agent and negotiate hard on the fee.