which search engine do you use

54druids

Which search engine would you look at for houses in scotland. I moved from England to Scotland 5 years ago and used primelocation and rightmove but found out about the sspc after i moved. My argument is that if you live in England you probably do not know about the sspc and would use the other main search engines. My friend is using a solicitor to sell her house but they are not on any other search engine other than sspc. She has a nicely presented bungalow under 200k but hasn't had 1 viewing in 4 months and I wonder if this is why.

poppy_f1

i look at
rightmove
epsc - for edinburgh and east central scotland
s1homes.com
remax-scotland
yourmove.co.uk

and a few local ones specifically for west lothian like kirktonpropertycentre.com and a few local lawyers who also have a estate agency attached

to be honest most of the listings i see are duplicates on say rightmove and espc

googler

Sounds like you should have spoken to a local before you moved .... did you buy a house without even travelling to the area you were buying in?

There's four 'tiers' to property websites in Scotland - agents' own websites, national franchise-chain websites, solicitor property centre portals, and third-party commercal portals.

In reverse order, the third-party commercial portals are the likes of rightmove, s1homes and primelocation (which also includes propertyfinder, and a few others). Typically, anything that appears on these portals appears there in addition to appearing on one of the other places.

Short history for those outside of Scotland - a number of years ago, solicitors decided that in addition to dealing with the legal aspects of house moves, they'd branch out into marketing property as well; so these days you have solicitor firms with their own 'property dept' (sometimes just one or two staff), essentially a mini-estate agency within the solicitor firm. The Solicitor Property Centres came about in the pre-internet days, the idea being to establish a central 'shop window' in the city, so that buyers were saved the legwork of looking in all the various solicitor windows, and could browse all of them in one location, and get details there as well. This gave some of them a dominance in market, since only the solicitors who handled property were allowed in - estate agencies without a solicitor arm were barred from entry. This was actually the subject of a monopolies commission investigation a few years back.

So, in addition to the commercial portals, you have the various SPC websites around the country, typically in the primary cities. ESPC for Edinburgh, GSPC for Glasgow, etc.

In addition to these are the websites for the larger 'chain' and franchise agencies; Your Move and RE/MAX come immediately to mind. These agencies have office networks covering the whole country, and you can hence search countrywide, whereas the SPC sites limit you to in and around the city of choice.

Lastly, there's individual agents websites for the non-SPC, non-chain agents, and also additional websites for some of the SPC solicitors, who display properties on their own websites as well as their combined portal.
Does this help? Want some web addresses as well...?

googler

54druids wrote: »

My friend is using a solicitor to sell her house but they are not on any other search engine other than sspc. She has a nicely presented bungalow under 200k but hasn't had 1 viewing in 4 months and I wonder if this is why.

Which SPC?

You seem to be implying that people aren't looking at her property because people from England aren't aware of the SPCs - but the majority of people moving to Scottish properties are likely to be moving within Scotland and thus will be well aware of them. Can we have a look at the web listing for the bungalow in case there may be other reasons why no-one is interested in it?

54druids

it is under thorntons solictors for druids park. This estate houses about 70+ properties and does not attract a local market . I would say about half the residents here move here from England or Ireland and another quarter come from outside Perth but in Scotland.