Recently there has been a large increase in the amount of people selling their house online. A lot of people are simply shunning their estate agents (and their fees) and deciding to sell their house independently at lower fixed price on the internet.
Doing so can save you money and not just pennies either; recent surveys have proven that people are saving up to £82,000 by selling their properties in this manner. Other polls in newspapers and property press have also shown success stories of large proportions, for instance a poll in the Evening Standard revealed that a home owner in Kensington, London, sold their property and saved £82,250 in estate agent fees. A few others saved £25,000 and £35,000 in Islington and Wandsworth.
Another success story of independent internet selling is the one of 'Melissa Porter', a property program host for the BBC. Her program 'Escape to the Country' often gave advice about moving house and how to save money. Melissa Porter took her own advice and decided to steer away from the 2% +VAT agency fees and decided to sell her West London home online using the popular website PropertyBroker.com.
Representatives of the website then came and photographed her home and erected a for sale board for a one of fee of just over £130. Within a week she had 3 enquires above her asking prices of £525,000, she chose a cash buyer and dealt with him directly.
This trend is being helped to become more main stream by rising house prices and estate agent fees. People can see an alternative and simply choose to take it and in doing so are reaping large financial rewards, and you can too!
Estate agents and their national association (The NAEA) have begun to recognise this threat to their business and have shown their concerns.
The websites people are using are a relatively new concept for houses and utilize the sort of layout and navigation that has been used for private ads for dating, used car sales and other classifieds for years. Sellers can simply log on to one of these sites for free or for very small cost and post a profile and photos of their property for buyers to browse. Buyers then simply logon, browse listed properties and can then contact the sellers to find out more information or arrange a viewing. Some sites will even take all the photos and post the ad for you; others provide you with for-sale signs at a small cost.
The cost of selling on one of these websites range from free to around £500, which is buttons compared to the percentage charges that an estate agent would charge which are around 1.5% to 3% of your properties worth.
Aside from the obvious money saving aspect, DIY selling has few drawbacks and quite a few nice advantages to be had; such as the extra control over the final price and negotiations.
Selling in this manner can also quicken up the whole process, leaving you less likely to get involved in chains and skipping the wait for estate agent administration.
One of the only draw backs is that you may have to handle all enquiries, viewings, and advertising yourself which can be time consuming.
Aside from the huge success stories it is save to say that depending on the value and type of property you are most likely to save a lot of money selling your house independently online and even achieve a higher price than asking., so if you can withstand the possibility of perhaps a little extra short term hassle why not give it ago?