DIY house selling

I'm about to sell a bungalow near Derby, and want to try advertising it myself. Google turns up many web sites, some free, some charging up to

150 quid or so. The more expensive ones claim they get your house onto other sites such as assertahome, fish4homes, and so on - but I've not found one that claims to put it on rightmove, who all our local agents use.

Any advice, please, on the relative merits of these sites, experiences, dire warnings, other ideas?

Reply to
Autolycus
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In message , Autolycus writes

Only agents can use Rightmove, which is probably the most popular sight.

Doing it yourself you might get lucky, but only have yourself to blame when the usual things dont go right, and no-one with experience to help you through the various problems and negotiations.

Reply to
Richard Faulkner

Try your local Loot first. Reaches people in your area far better.

Reply to
G&M

Or the local weekly paper. Much better than internet where there are far too many sites with very few interesting houses on them :-)

Anna

~~ Anna Kettle, Suffolk, England |""""| ~ Plaster conservation and lime plaster repair / ^^ \ // Freehand modelling in lime: overmantels, pargeting etc |____|

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01359 230642

Reply to
Anna Kettle

Some places you can get a good deal by going in both.

Reply to
G&M

advertising it

agents

experiences,

If you live in a desirable area that is within an hour and a half of London (door to station) then market your house in the London evening standard. A friend of mine sold a house on Eastbourne marina within a week. It's not cheap ( acouple of hundred but he did use a photo) but an estate agent would have cost him £7,000 !!

Reply to
AK

I have not sold my house yet, despite changing agents three weeks ago. I am, however, getting more viewings through the new agent, and the type of viewer is more applicable to the style and price of the property. Note that the market has cooled considerably in some parts of the country, following the recent spate of negative reports in the media about an impending crash.

But I have also placed printed postcards in newsagents' windows, not, I hasten to add, to try and cheat the agent out of his fee (since the card plainly states that it is not a private sale), but to get every possible chance of making my property known to as wide a section of the public as possible. I also have made use of a free web site to publicise my property.

However, despite cards being in newsagents' windows for weeks, I have had exactly two enquiries, neither of which led to a viewing. Since it's only a few pounds spent, there's no harm done, but I think you need to use much bigger guns if you want to stand a chance of selling your property on your own. Also, the web site has not produced one single enquiry so far!

I think far more drastic measures would be called for, such as leafletting households (but which areas to choose?), putting leaflets on cars in superstore car parks, adverts in papers, and so on. I did discover only a day or two ago that Tesco don't charge for placing a card in their customer advertising boards and you can imagine how many hundreds of eyes peruse those in a week! (I popped down to two local Tesco stores sharpish!)

Maybe others know of other free outlets for cards, hint, hint! I did wonder whether it would be cost effective to mail many local companies, enclosing a card, with a polite request to place the card on their employee notice board. If the letters were addressed to Human Resources (aka Personnel) departments there'd be less likelihood of the cards just ending up in the bin. Obviously many would, as company policy would prohibit such use of their private facilities, but if you pointed out that it may be in their interests to have their employees move closer to work, or attract new staff, there could be a hit rate as high as 50%. So if you mailed a hundred letters second class, it would cost £21 for theoretically unlimited advertising on the notice boards in 50 companies.

In any case, when my agent finally does find me a buyer, I won't mind paying the fee. It's a very small amount compared to the total chunk of cash I'll be getting!

Finally, when doing it entirely on your own, you do run the risk of inviting some dubious characters into your house.

MM

Reply to
Mike Mitchell

Think long and hard about this. The overwhelming majority of people buy houses by walking into agents (perhaps in response to the agent's ad in the local property paper). By selling it yourself, you are excluding the 90% of house buyers who wouldn't dream of buying a house any other way. The agent may charge you a couple of thousand quid, but will probably get you a sale at a much higher price in compensation.

Christian.

Reply to
Christian McArdle

We, and a number of other people we know, often buy houses on the basis of 'For Sale' signs outside the house. There's a very good reason for this, we often decide where we want the house to be and a quick drive around the area is a much quicker way to get some suitable houses to see than 'cold' visiting estate agents. We may miss some that don't have signs but on the other hand we may see some being sold by agents we wouldn't otherwise visit (and/or some being sold privately).

FWIW of the 5 houses we've sold over the past 30 years or so one was definitely sold to someone who saw the sign outside. The others I don't really know what attracted the buyers.

For *letting* as opposed to buying/selling our experience with agents has been almost wholly negative.

-- Chris Green

Reply to
usenet

I agree that I've gone into an agent in the basis of a sign. We were looking in a fairly narrow geographical location, so needed as many leads as we could get. However, the agents had usually told us about the vast majority of the houses before the sign even went up. It tended to be the small agencies I'd never noticed before that got calls on the basis of displayed signs.

I'd be very wary of buying from someone selling privately. Firstly, in all my property transactions so far, the agent has been the prime factor in holding chains together. They've worked very hard for their commissions, banging heads, swearing at solicitors etc. Secondly, it would put a feeling in the back of my mind that the vendor might be a bit of a cheapskate and likely to attempt a stitching up later in the day, like upping the price after you've spent hundreds/thousands on surveys and the like.

Christian.

Reply to
Christian McArdle

When I was buying, I had signed up with all the local agents, but I just got bored looking through the sackload of house details which kept arriving. Eventually, I went and drove around the areas I was interested in looking for "For Sale" boards. The house I eventually bought was found this way. When I was chucking out the sackloads of house details afterwards, I had been sent details of that one some weeks before, but the leaflet quoted a price above my range so I had ignored it at the time.

Anyway, you might want to put up a board was what I was getting round to saying;-)

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Only a couple of agents were like that for us. Everyone else was far more selective, although it might be because we were particularly specific in what we wanted. (Basically within approximately half a mile of a particular point and built no later than 1918 within a 40K bracket). The worst agent is still sending me irrelevent stuff by SMS 12 months after I moved. 3 bed semi in Silverdale Road anyone?

Christian.

Reply to
Christian McArdle

To anyone who is interested, if you are willing to supply such details as can be found on my website under 'items For Sale' BUNGALOW and get the estate agents permission for me to link to them, I am willing to give you a page on my website FREE. Please, if you are interested, use the contact button on the website.

-- troubleinstore

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mail can be sent via website. Email address in posting is ficticious and is intended as spam trap

Reply to
troubleinstore

How much was the house worth ?!

If you're paying more than 1.5% to an estate agent haggle and try elsewhere.

Reply to
G&M

experiences,

and is grateful for the advice from all who responded.

Richard Faulkner's advice to use an agent was unsurprising - "well he would, wouldn't he"

My local Loot is Admag, which is a bit thin on property for sale above about ninepence, but certainly worth a try.

The local paper has some curiously inflexible packages on offer, but I'll certainly try it: I could advertise every night for a year for less than an agent's commission (what was that joke about "how many insertions?)

I'm just outside London commuterland - 10 minutes to Long Eaton station, then almost two hours to St Pancras.

Mike Mitchell raises two interesting points: the agent's fee is small compared with the selling price, and that you might get dubious characters by selling directly. I don't go for logarithmic money - three thousand quid is the same whether its out of a 200k house sale or on an ice lolly. Do agents really filter their viewers that well? Even if they accompany, I'd as soon deal with such characters myself than let a 20-year old girl do so. Mine is also a slightly special case in that I live next door to the bungalow being sold.

Christian's point about the overwhelming majority buying as a result of visiting agents was, curiously, contradicted by all four local agents who I got to pitch for selling the place: they all rather shot themselves in the foot by gushing about how many of their sales now came via their web sites, even sales to older buyers who I'm expecting to be my main target. The variation in their suggested selling price was also interesting: from 160k to 200k, with one of the two 200k valuers being the only one of the four to adduce any evidence, in the form of property details for similar houses they'd sold recently. Christian's correlation between cheapskate and dubious ethical values was interesting, but I would argue that it is at best only a very loose one. I'm a cheapskate, but a very honest one, and one of my reasons for avoiding agents is their often breathtaking disregard for truth (ime, of course).

I'll certainly go for a "For Sale" board, and may even (shock, horror) ohl one. I think I'll also splash the hundred quid to get it on assertahome, fish4homes, and homesandproperty, and, if I can find the site again that offers it, rightmove.

Then I'll do my own conveyancing again.... (ducks, runs for cover)

Reply to
Autolycus

I think he's a reformed character now - an ex-agent :-)

One thing to bear in mind is that if you're advertising or producing any literature for the house at all then you _may_ very well be bound by a lot of the provisions of the Estate Agent's Act (I think it's called that - IANAL, quite evidently!), notwithstanding the fact that this is a DIY sale and not using an agent.

You would do well to read up on this, and seek advice if necessary.

-- Richard Sampson

email me at richard at olifant d-ot co do-t uk

Reply to
RichardS

scrub that - it doesn't seem that the act applies because you are not engaging in business as an Estate Agent.

The act that I was thinking of is the "The Property Misdescriptions Act

1991"

-- Richard Sampson

email me at richard at olifant d-ot co do-t uk

Reply to
RichardS

In message , Autolycus writes

FYI I have sold my agency and do not have a vested interest.

However, if I was selling a property, I would use an agent. In fact, not so long ago, I sold my home which was not on my patch, and used an agent.

Reply to
Richard Faulkner

So what's with

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? Looks like an estate agency to me, complete with mug shot (as of 3:45pm GMT 15/07/04).

MBQ

Reply to
MBQ

In message , MBQ writes

I'm so relaxed in early retirement that I forgot all about it.

The new owners now use rightmove.co.uk

Phone them - I dont work there anymore!

Reply to
Richard Faulkner

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