Selling your home privately in the UK

No, we don't. Bliss! Yet another reason why life up here in the frozen wastes is so superior to Down South.

Actually, "No we don't" is only almost true. Yes we do, but most of them are solicitors (or work in solicitors firms). There are hardly any EAs who are not part of a solicitors firm. I think this has its origins in the fact that by law (which as you know is different in Scotland) solicitors held a monopoly on selling property, and although this monopoly has been abolished (I think), solicitors did have the market cornered so non-solicitor EAs haven't really caught on much.

Another thing is that there are really no chains here, and I gather that you lot dump on your EAs the job of trying to make sure they all mesh together smoothly. So there's alot less work for them to do here.

Yes. When I sold my flat 2 years ago (for about £180k) my solicitor charged me an EA fee of 1% (plus VAT) plus a conveyancing fee of £550 (plus VAT) plus the usual outlays involved in conveyancing (totalling under £200) plus an insertion fee of £200 for the ESPC list/website. I also elected (on his advice) to have a pre-sale valuation carried out by an independent surveyor, and this cost £125+VAT.

And the other reasons are..... ?

How do you not have chains ?

IME being registered means that I get anywhere from 20 to 50 randomly selected full colour photocopy pages in the mail each week, often in seperate envelopes sent on the same day from the same agent.

I'm lucky if even one or two come anywhere near the criterea that I've (very explicitly) expressed to the agents.

I know the feeling but I have recently registered with about 3 agents and most of them are pretty good at sending me stuff that is very close to what I asked for, unlike when I last bought a house.

When you offered it for sale did you ask for a Fixed Price or Offers Over ? I am also in Edinburgh. We had two solicitor's valuers round to give us a valuation at the end of last year. One advised a fixed price that seemed very low to us and our neighbours. The other suggested an offers over price that was higher than the first ones fixed price.Two neighbouring flats have since been sold in the same week. One went for the suggested price that the offers over solicitor said that we might get. The other went for 22K more than that and did not have D.B. or C.H and was supposed to be rather scruffy. Go figure. One flat we were interested in was advertised at offers over 139,500. One solicitor in the practice we are using said that we would need to offer

170K to get it the other said that 162 would be about right. Our offer was the lowest of three and it went for 189,500. Who really knows the market or what someone silly enough will offer. Another that we were interested in was offers over 165K they admitted that really wanted around 190K for it. After being on the market for weeks it was put in at a fixed price of 180K but I am told that they finally accepted 178K. We have just viewed the practically identical flat underneath that one, it has been on the market for a few weeks. Initially it was offers over 145K but is not at a fixed price of 175K Many flats bought initially to rent out in our rapidly expanding Leith Shore development have been coming on to the market and are sitting unsold and fluctuating between offers over and fixed price. Derek.

Oh, lots of things. The weather, for one. And the fact that assets are not presumed to become joint upon marriage, so when you divorce, your ex-spouse has no claim on your premarital assets. The scenery. The midges.

We do, but we don't get our EAs to fix things so the entire chain completes on the same day, and all the moving also takes place on the same day. People sort out their moving dates themselves.

We deal with property here the same way we (and you) deal with, say, cars. When you agree to sell or buy one, you then go ahead and do it. You don't say "I can't buy your car until I've sold mine, but don't worry, there's someone coming round tonight to look at it".

People here accept that timing is their own responsibility. Sure, you may end up owning two houses for a short period or else having to stay in B&B/holiday/rented accommodation while you have none. When my sister and her husband sold their place when they last moved, they moved in with her parents (and me) for a few weeks because the entry date of their purchase was later than that of their sale.

The problems associated with this are alleviated by the fact that transactions generally proceed much more quickly, as less can go wrong. One week from offer to *full* acceptance (equivalent to "exchange") is normal, with completion (or "entry date" as we call it) typically agreed as 5-6 weeks from acceptance.

What are your EA fees? If 3%, that's 2% more than here. Now 2% on a (say) £200k property is £4k. That'll easily buy a nice extended family holiday, or half a year's rent for a temporary place, or a good few months' interest on a bridging loan.

You're warming to the idea, aren't you? You don't want all this money to flow into an EA's pocket, do you?

At the moment I have 13 saved properties on my Rightmove list. Today one came up as being under offer. In the case of four others the Estate agents have told me that they are either sold or under offer. I have left them on my saved list to see how long they remain on offer. Derek.

Cold, windy, misty,

Is that a good thing ? (peronsaly I think that sharing 2% of pre-marital assest for each year of a relationship after the first 3 is probably a fair compromise).

HAve you seen how good HD TV can be :-)

and the generosity of the locals.

That happens down here sometimes as well, usually after negotiations get stalemated and after revised pricing has been agreed to compensate for the extra costs.

Why can less go wrong ?

Why so long to completion ?

Nah - its too cold in Winter - I am moving South (at least for the winters).

Offers Over, of course. There is a bit of a stigma attached to "fixed price" because it's seen to send the message thet it's not selling at "offers over". There's no good reason for it, but traditionally properties which haven't sold at OO have been moved to FP and have then sold. The real message behind FP is "I want a quick sale", so more recently, in view of a generally expected slump in the market, some properties have been entering the market at FP and not bothering with OO.

So much so that a real increase in the proportion of listings at FP has been noticeable, but it hasn't really lasted, I think.

Sounds like a mistake by the first.

Was it first floor and the others not? D.B.? Did you mis-spell D.G.?

Aye, well. I can't remember what my surveyor's PSV was, but based on whatever it was (I think we were expecting in the high 160s of £k), and on my solicitor's experience-driven advice, it went on at OO £129k (outrageously provocative almost on a par with those I "Warned" about (am I being too unsubtle here?)). I say £182k was a pretty good result.

Leith isn't all that desirable as such, it's just that it benefits from being within commuting distance of Edinburgh-proper. If I couldn't afford to live in Edinburgh, I'd prefer Portobello to Leith, given than SQ would likely also be too expensive.

Or I could bail out to Oban where the sailing's better.

Exactly, more comfortable and bearbale than hot, balmy, and chokingly dry.

Yes.

I think sharing should be decided by whomever has the assets to share. There's nothing to stop him (or her) making the transfer explicit, I just think it's wrong to make it implicit.

Saints preserve us.

Because the contract ties everything up early on.

To allow time for all the technical stuff which in your neck of the woods happens before exchange.

Don't worry, sweetie, cuddle up to me and I'll keep you warm. I didn't mean you should move up here, hen, I meant you to warm to the idea of adopting our system down there in, er, er, what's the opposite of Utopia?

Especially with a wee dram

It is - nobody is forced to endow with all my worldly goods.

And if you aren't prepared to make that commitment why bother with marriage ?

Is it true that religious rivalry is almost as bad as in NI ?

And what happens if there are problems in the technical stuff ?

Being Welsh..... I should really return westwards to my roots.

Dystopia is actually the opposite of Utopia. - I imagine it to be full of hairy drunken scotsmen in Kilts who work in England as Estate Agents (joke).

I too am hoping to move South (again). An English estate agent answered my question about how many accepted offers fail to complete by saying at least

30% Derek.

I guess an understanding of the reasons would be interesting:

- A better offer via a different agent

- Mortgage difficulties.

- Legal issues

- The buyer finding out something about the property that hadnt been made obvious before

and then an independant assesment of where the 'fault' lay for each scenario.

Some very quickly become fixed price. It seems in Edinburgh that the offers over percentage can be 10, 20 or 30% depending on the area in question.

I had used that firm to rent the flat out for me once and the rental figure they suggested was well below my expectation. I told them to ask for what I wanted and we got it.

Strangely they were both third floor. Do you think that some floors are more attractive to buyers than others. I have never been able to decide on that.

I did.

I believe that they really just base it on recently sold prices.

There's always Cramond :-)

And the rain is wetter. Derek.

Och aye, I say I'm not impartial to a nice G&T, but decent tonic (without artificial sweeteners) is hard to come by (Tesco's Finest is OK but a bit pricey), so when you can't get any (and even when you can) a small (or not so small) malt is much to be preferred. As the Reverend So-and-so used to say: All right, just a wee one, then. Water? Oh, yes, I take mine 50-50, with *plenty* of water.

Endow? That went out with the ark. Along with Obey. An endowment is what you get when you become a dowager (widow(er)). Divorce is not like death. It undoes not only the marriage but the endowment as well.

Realism, hen. More marriages are parted by divorce than by death.

Not in the least, unless you're daft enough to be into football *and* religion. I don't think the overlap is particularly significant. Glasgow might get the odd bit of trouble, but we in the East are more refained.

Then the contract says what happens. Basically, one party would be in breach of contract and has to compensate the other. There rarely are such problems.

Does Wales have a better house selling system than England too?

Hey, your sense of humour rivals even that of Basil Brush. Meet me under the mistletoe. Play your cards right and I might show you my etchings.

First floors are best. The more stairs there are to climb, the worse. Ground floors are at risk form burglars. So are top floors (via the roof). First floors represent the ideal compromise.

Cramond's overrated. It's OK if you like taking pot shots at aircraft with your fireworks left over from 5th Nov, but my sister wasn't really into that sort of pastime so she sold up and moved to Morningsade.

We ruled Cramond out after trying to get there one evening to view a flat at Cramond Green. There had been an accident on the Forth Road Bridge and the traffic was backed up as far as Craigleith. Derek.

I would say shrewed would be a better way to describe the people who use

We can get as much exposure as most estate agents and we won't use smoke and mirrors to deceive you in anyway, but rather a fair and transparent service where everybody pays the same flat fee that is tied to our own expenditure not the value of your home.

The estate agents will defend themselves to the last man :-) Many estate agents are deliberately vague about the address of the property they are selling. We all want to know exactly where a property is from the advert not just the area. I asked an estate agent why and he replied that if the full address was in the advert 'unscrupulous people' would knock on the sellers door and try to bypass the estate agent. Derek.