Any tips on making EA work harder to seel your prop

kam_bhar

Has anyone got any tips on how to make EAs work a little harder selling your house, I've got mine up for sale (went on market 9/2/06).

The dilema I face is that Ive found a new place and had an offer acepted the vendors EA say he will only stop marketing the property once Im in a postion to "proceed" ie sold my place The vendor is looking for a quick sale and im scared I'll lose it. :eek:

So far Ive had one viewing maybe im being over anxious but I did have it on the market before and it sold very quickly (less than 2 weeks) but had to withdraw due to family problems. So far this time round there seems to have been a disturbing lack of intrest my house is a first time buyers house (£84950)

Kam

Meeten

how about urging the EA with financial bribery.
i.e - if oyu complete on this property by xxx date, I will pay £x bonus. If you do not, then I will request another reduction in fees / change in EA.

Good luck

westernpromise

Kidnap his family and post them to him, one piece per week, until he sells your property.

If your conscience troubles you, he's only an estate agent.

dander

My best tip is to keep in touch with the agent - call them regularly, go in - ask them for suggestions and opinions. Ask agent how many people they have on their books in your price range - ask to see other properties so you can compare and decide how you stand against the competition. Keep asking the agent things like - will it be in the paper this week?

However, do remember that however hard the agent works, they can't force anyone to buy your place. If they don't have many people looking in your price range, they can't rustle people up from nowhere.

And of course the surest way to get a quick sale is always to put your house on the market at a low price.

bylromarha

kam_bhar, we're selling in the area too.

It seems to be pretty slow round here, loads of for sale signs, not many Sold.

Which agent are you with? I don't know if you've done the buyer test, but there are only 2 agents on New Union Street that are actively pushing properties to me as a buyer, even though I'm registered with most of them. 3 of them have not rung back when I asked for viewings, had to chase them more than once to make an appointment to view.:eek:

Doozergirl

Ask for a bit more from them. If your interior is visually good or you have a nice garden and they have a 'property of the week' in their newspaper advert, ask if it can be you, or if just if you can have two pictures instead of one this week.

If you want to push it, you can try for editorial (if you don't know, it looks like a whole article on a particular house); even offer to pay for part of it yourself - it will gain extra interest for you. We paid an extra £150 + vat for a glossy, (last minute reduced rate) ad in the Birmingham Post property section, which is where our purchasers found us in the end. Sometimes it can be worth a little extra expenditure.

gentlepurr

be nice to the people that work in the reception, tell them about the unique selling points of your house, or better still, get them to come and view your house, so they can really push it to prospective buyers. if you're nice to them, they'll remember you when they are pushing properties to interested people.

xx

kam_bhar

bylromarha

We are with Bairstow Eve's Radford branch.

Got a mate to ring them asking for properties matching ours and they did mention ours. Since then things have moved on to the tune of 6 viewings 3 in one day

Havent had any offers and only 3 people have given any feed back if you could call it feed back all we have back is them saying "its not what we are looking for" The lack of descriptive feed back makes me think that the EA in his haste to get us signed up gave us some bad advice. I was going to redecororate upstairs and lay new carpets in the bedroms before I put it up for sale but their advice was to put it up for sale and do the work, Upstairs was like a tip while we were painting etc which must have put off all the viewers. I'm hoping to have it all done by this weekend. I am getting very nervous that because of bad advice from our EA we lost 6 potential buyers

Kam

Doozergirl

You should get everything as right as you can before inviting viewers, I often choose to ignore EAs when they say 'leave it'. We had the bathroom from hell in one flat when we had it valued and there's no doubt it would have put some people off. I try to give viewers as little to worry about as I can. Even I, who expect to have some work to do, can be seduced by an immaculately presented house. Mess and clutter will only make people think the house is small and a new neutral carpet does wonders for any house.

Ask your EA for honest feedback - trying to be nice or avoiding problems is not going to help you sell your house.

zappahey

kam_bhar wrote:

Havent had any offers and only 3 people have given any feed back if you could call it feed back all we have back is them saying "its not what we are looking for"

I'm not sure I'd worry about that too much. We've looked at a few houses and some have had nothing that we actually disliked. They just didn't have that indefineable something for us.

Now we've found somewhere that interests us and it has nothing special but just an overall air of "we could spend quite a few years here".

I'm probably rambling a bit just to say don't worry about fuzzy feedback.

bylromarha

kam_bhar- we aren't registered with the radford branch, only city. Have to say they aren't too hot on getting properties our way. We viewed a property through the city branch and we never got a phone call asking for feedback. It's good they mentioned your house to your friend...did your friend get the details posted to them as asked?

I viewed a property last week and they were in the process of moving out, hence the shed/garage contents were everywhere. Didn't make a difference to me as I wasn't there to look at their shed contents! A buyer who likes the house will see past the junk, so I shouldn't worry too much about the tins of paint for those few viewings you had, although if they aren't there, that's even better!