Selling house without estate agent

If you live in a popular area (as in lots of movement in hourses being bought/sold) then just stick a for sale sign up outside your house with "Apply Within" written very clearly. As long as you don't mind complete strangers knocking on your door at bizarre times, then you may get more interest than you thought. I've always driven or walked around an area before going to estate agents and most of my friends do the same so you're probably more likely to get the spontaneous interest then if you went thru' an estate agent.

I've no idea what a 'hourses' is - must be something to do with the Grand National today!

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately mine is the last house in the road in a cul de sac so I don't much passing traffic - foot or otherwise.

However, from some of the sales that seem to be going on locally it seems fairly buoyant at the moment.

dan

Based on my research, the two most popular ones seem to be

and

Be very very careful.

An agent can ask the right questions and expect to get the answers but can you ask them:

1) How much money do you have?

2) Do you have to sell and what is the current position with the sale?

If someone wants to buy can you check out their story with their estate agent, solicitor, lender, etc to verify.

When the sale proceeds do you know who to instruct. Can you telephone relevant parties to liase and check progress. Will professionals actually agree to talk direct to you - a layperson. They probably will not but would speak to other professionals.

It is not as easy as finding someone to buy it is checking potential buyers out.

P

In message , dan writes

In the simplest terms, the following is a fairly good general justification for using an estate agent.

For some strange reason, of around 1.3 million house sales per year, around 1 million sellers ask an estate agent to handle the sale.

Given the negative publicity that estate agents receive, (I am one of them), this is an extremely high percentage, and would seem to suggest that people actually value what estate agents do for them, even if they dont like using them.

As an estate agent, when I have sold my own house, out of our immediate catchment area, I have used an estate agent.

Invariably, when I have carried out a valuation for someone like you, who then tries to sell privately, I get a call 6 months or so later, asking me to act. Or I see it on the market with a competitor.

Usually it is because they thought they had found a buyer, but they were then strung along, only to find that the buyer couldnt get the money, or revised their offer downwards at the last minute. We also often find that it is a buyer that we knew, who had wasted our time on several previous occasions.

Anyway, all the best. You might be one of the 20% or so who succeed without an agent. You will never know how much easier it might have been, or how much more money you might have got, had you used an agent.

Ten years ago we sold our house in Surrey by putting a sign in the window and advertising it Loot. We used a local cut price lawyer do the convayancing. I did not even meet the lawyer, just spoke to him on the phone and collected any documents from his office. He transferred the proceeds to our bank account. From memory we paid him about 130 plus 25 for the BACS transfer. Derek.

I guess there is no harm putting it on with the estate agent and privately on the web as well (at the same time). As I understand it, there should be no violation of the T&C's on the estate agent contract if you manage to sell it privately.

Or it could be because only a miniscule % of the UK population is online (in any useful sense), and advertising the house yourself in local press is potentially about as expensive as using an estate agent.

The whole estate agent business stands and falls on limited exchange of information. If there was a website which every Joe Public automatically visited when looking for a house, practically every residential property estate agent would be out of business.

The only difficult issue is valuing the property. Estate agents have a feel for what they can get away with, which is why if you want to sell a house yourself you still get an estate agent to come round and give you a valuation. I can think of a few ways this could be done. None are perfect but neither are estate agents; many properties remain for sale for many months so clearly some agents get the valuation completely wrong (or the clients ask for too much).

In message , John-Smith writes

Not sure how true this is now. The major property sites get millions of hits a week.

There isnt, and I dont think there will be - not just one, anyway.

This would prevent Joe Public getting his free valuations, which are based on masses of historic, and bang up to date, experience. Any individual putting a house on the market in the early new year in my patch would probably have got a mega quick sale, (and thought they had done really well by saving the agents fees), but would have missed a 20% jump in price, and lost around £20,000 to £40,000.

I'm not sure what you mean by limited exchange of info? Is it that people cant find a source of properties available for sale? Hence the estate agent?

Much of what we do takes place after finding a buyer - unless you are an estate agent, you will have little idea of what is involved.

Occasionally the former. Invariably the latter. It is not necessarily an error in valuation. If there is no rush to sell, what is the harm in testing the market at a high price for a while.

Anyway - I should care. If you dont use an estate agent, when the majority do, that is within your gift, and I wish you well.

But presumably Joe would have saved more than the 20,000 to 40,000 when he bought his next property at that time, assuming he was trading up?

In message , Doug Ramage writes

Not if he found his buyer and agreed his price in say, January, but didnt find his new house until say, February/March.

And not if he was selling and not buying - e.g. a buy-to-let, or a bereavement etc.

Not so. There *is* a website which every Joe Public automatically visits (well, there is in some local markets, and location being everything, it makes a lot of sense to have locality-specific websites). If you're looking to buy in or around Edinburgh, *and are online* (noting your comment that a great many potential buyers do not have useful web access), then you'd be fool not to visit the ESPC website. ESPC is the Edinburgh Solicitors' Property Centre, and of course in Scotland there tend not to be estate agents as such, as most estate agency work is done by solicitors, who throw the conveyancing in. ESPC are virtually a cartel, with more than 90% of Edinburgh sales going through their member firms.

So, far from putting themselves out of business, I think their website has probably done them good. Ten years ago, when their site was less established, and a lot fewer punters were online, ESPC were already a cartel, they used to publish a weekly list (still do) with each property getting about one column-inch giving a basic description. Split into sections by area, and within each section sorted by asking price. All the member firms, and some banks, have copies of this tabloid-format list available free to the public. You pick it up and browse, and circle maybe a dozen properties. Then, for each, you'd either visit or ring the solicitor and ask for a copy of the full particulars, or you'd visit the actual centre downtown, where they kept a stock of particulars and you'd just pick up the whole lot.

Nowadays, if you're on-line, you can just download the particulars yourself and not even bother printing them out. A quick on-screen look tens to be enough to make you decide whether to go and view.

So the trick is not to set up such a website in competition with estate agents, but to have it run *by* the estate agents. This also, of course, discourages cut-throat competition between estate agents, and makes a nonsense of vendors listing their properties through several.

If you want a valuation, get an independent valuer/surveyor to value it, not an estate agent. After all, then you'll tend to get the same answer your purchasers will get.

In message , Ronald Raygun writes

is having a go at this.

Except that valuers/surveyors are working on the history of the past few months and, if a market is rising fast, they can miss some spectacular rises. They dont tend to project the trend.

In a falling market, surveyors tend to project the trend, so values may be less than could be achieved.

It's called CYA.

If The Land Registry would release their data by whole postcode rather than just the first part of it, valuations wouldn't be quite so hit and miss. No freedom of information where our no.1 industry is concerned.

Just thought of another very significant problem.

Estate Agents often have more than one party wanting to buy a property and check out the chain of all parties. If they find one chain with a 'self sold' party it may deter them from that particular purchaser. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of Estate Agents have this unwritten policy of not treating 'self solds' seriously .

P

They do indeed, and some I know of are very rude to self sellers.

The problem is that most customers are not online, most vendors are not online, and for as long as *some* vendors don't advertise online, people will always visit an estate agent. Nobody will want to miss out on some bargain, or whatever.

The question is how long it will take to reach a critical mass. Probably a very long time, due to the fragmentation in the online market.

What I mean is that the information is too fragmented to be useful, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future. If by visiting say five websites you were able to view every property for sale within say

30 miles of a postcode, then people would just do that. But there are loads of property websites, and moreover everybody knows that most houses for sale are not on any of them. Nobody likes to miss out on their "ideal house" and this keeps the agents in business, and will continue to do so.

The valuation issue could be dealt with by registering in some central place how much a property sold for, and new advertisers could use that as a yardstick.