Selling houses online

[DrPhill]

Has anyone had experience of using the internet to sell or buy a house? I do not mean simply browsing for houses posted by estate agents, but cutting out the estate agents altogether. £3000 seems a lot of money for taking a feww photos, printing a brochure, and uploading the details to rightmove. Or am I being unfair to estate agents?

Any thoughts, anecdotes, experience or advice welcome......

 

[JakeS]

Or am I being unfair to estate agents?

When I sold my last house I figured "one estate agent is probably as good as another, everyone looks on RightMove anyway". In the end I was surprised how many people apparently actually go to the estate agent and sit down with someone and look at brochures together still.

I was also surprised at how utterly incompetent the first estate agent I took on was; the people who eventually bought the house through a second agent apparently gave the first one specifications which more or less exactly matched my house, and weren't even shown it! So I'd certainly be interested to know how well people fare selling a house without going through an agent, just 'cause it's a tempting proposition should I need to move again.



My gut feeling, though, is that estate agents have made themselves a market; so long as people still go to agents to find listings of houses, it'll be necessary to engage an agent to sell your house.

 

[SVB]

Depends on your time pressure and level of hassle your prepared to put up with I suppose. If you do not need a quick sale and are prepared or able to have someone at home when people want to view then you could do worse than give it a go.

If you don't want the hassle, or can't be flexible enough to fit with buyers needs because no one is home at certain times or the day or if swmbo not keen on showing the house alone then estate agents start to make a bit of sense. Other dimension is whether your property is in a particular niche or bracket that buyers would expect to go to an agent.

You can do both of course in parallel but the estate agent will increase fee as same work with now a reduced chance of collecting a fee.

Not sure agents carry an liability, think all passed on to surveyor or back to vendor but may be wrong on this.

Note to self - can't believe I have just defended estate agents fees!!!! I guess the bit that i can't explain or justify is the correlation between selling price and fee payable. Ok, multi million pad may justify a pucker brochure but that's a couple of hundred quid max, for the rest of the market it make negligible difference I can see.

There we go, normal service has been resumed - phew!

My tuppence anyway.

Simon

 

[JakeS]

I guess the bit that i can't explain or justify is the correlation between selling price and fee payable.

I think the idea is that if there's a correlation between the sale price and the fee, the customer is assured that the agent is trying to get the highest price for them possible, because like that the agent gets paid the most. While if the agent is on a flat fee payment, they have every motivation in the world to try and coerce the seller into accepting a lower price than they really want in order to get a quick sale (and thus get paid quicker and avoid the risk of the seller going to another agent).

Estate agents have the most practice in the world at playing off both sides against the middle; they'll tell both buyer and seller that they "work for you" or "we're on your side", but of course, all they really care about at the end of the day is getting paid, regardless of how happy the buyer or the seller is about it.

(Realistically, I suspect most agents would still probably prefer a quick guaranteed sale with slightly less profit than a longer wait and the risk of losing the house to another agent.)