Private house sales

Place_of_Design

I am wanting to float an idea

We just sold our house privatally: detials are on our placeofdesign dot com website
We have litterally saved 1000's (not a spam, we genuinely just sold our house)

Results
The site did the job THE HOUSE IS SOLD STC! and within a few months too!!!! we are calling that a A1 result

Costs
Website: We did this in-house. A similar website would be in the order of £500
Photography: We did this in-house, similar photography would be in the order of £300
Leaflets: designed in-house, design costs – unsure – but printing was £35.00
Delivery of leaflets – local paper shop – £15.00
For sale boards – we designed these in house, available for 6.99 each + 6.99 postage from a seller on a popular auction site
Assuming a sale – (we will keep you posted); we have spent a grand total of:
£245.00 – one of payment to internet estate agent in order to get our house listed online on the most popular auction site
£35.00 – leaflet printing
£15.00 – leaflet delivery
£20.97 – for sale boards
£50.00 – for a premium home.co.uk listing
5.99 – for a .co.uk domain name
£371.96 – grand total
This represents a saving of £4328.04 on the amount the estate agents wanted to charge us!

we set up a website just for our house - burtonjoycehome co uk

Question
Would the things we did in-house (photography/webdesign) be worth marketing as a viable product.

Would you pay say £300 for professional photographs or £500 for a professional website?

Have a read, look what we did. it worked for us, We are wondering can we make this work for others?

not_loaded

Housenetwork currently do this for £395.

badgeraudio

Place_of_Design wrote: »

£245.00 – one of payment to internet estate agent in order to get our house listed online on the most popular auction site
QUOTE]

Who did you use for that if you done mind?
We are considering something similar but looking for the cheapest way to get it onto right move etc.

Cheers

Mike

googler

I wouldn't pay £500 for an individual website, but I'd rather have my property listed where people are looking for properties ALREADY, rather than trying to generate traffic to a brand-new site.

I feel your comparison of costs with what the 'estate agent was going to charge you' isn't a like-for-like comparison.....

Also, you seem to be merely quoted material costs - how much time did you spend doing these tasks, and if you applied a reasonable hourly rate to this time, what would that add?

Where did your buyer come from? The website, the flyers, the home.co.uk listing?

If it was on home.co.uk, can you call it a private sale?

Richard_Webster

Have you checked your buyer's ability to get any mortgage he says he needs?

Have you checked how long the chain (if any) is below him?

Place_of_Design

googler wrote: »

I wouldn't pay £500 for an individual website, but I'd rather have my property listed where people are looking for properties ALREADY, rather than trying to generate traffic to a brand-new site.

I feel your comparison of costs with what the 'estate agent was going to charge you' isn't a like-for-like comparison.....

Also, you seem to be merely quoted material costs - how much time did you spend doing these tasks, and if you applied a reasonable hourly rate to this time, what would that add?

Where did your buyer come from? The website, the flyers, the home.co.uk listing?

If it was on home.co.uk, can you call it a private sale?

The buyer came via our website contact form

Its a gamble. we could have saved money by not paying the Rightmove fees home.co.uk fees

To be fair here is a breakdown

viewings:
leaflets: 1 viewing
Website: 7 viewings
Seen the board: 4 viewings
Rightmove 3 viewings
home.co.uk: 0 viewings

In terms of the costs..
They are fair costs, and are repersentative of what I would charge for doing them for someone else (that is my area of professionalisim i.e. website, photography). There are cheaper webdesigners, and cheaper photographers, (and plentymore expensive ones)

Graphic design isn't my spcialty, but we did it anyway: Design time for the boards: 1 hour. Design time for the flier: 1 hour

Place_of_Design

Richard_Webster wrote: »

Have you checked your buyer's ability to get any mortgage he says he needs?

Have you checked how long the chain (if any) is below him?

Of course. We are paying a solicitor for doing the conveyencing. (buying and selling) So far he is very very good, and is worth much more than he is charging

to be 100% accurate, ours is a cash sale, our buyers is a cash sale, his buyers is a cash sale, and the 2 below that are mortgages. We have confirmed these are all inplace and ready to go

Place_of_Design

badgeraudio wrote: »

Place_of_Design wrote: »

£245.00 – one of payment to internet estate agent in order to get our house listed online on the most popular auction site
QUOTE]

Who did you use for that if you done mind?
We are considering something similar but looking for the cheapest way to get it onto right move etc.

Cheers

Mike

thelowcostway co uk

Luckily, they seem to have reduced thier pricing too

Richard_Webster

to be 100% accurate, ours is a cash sale, our buyers is a cash sale, his buyers is a cash sale, and the 2 below that are mortgages. We have confirmed these are all inplace and ready to go

Trouble is that some sellers wouldn't realise that that kind of thing needed to be checked and months later wonder why sale is not progressing.... (Of course this can happen with some estate agents too.!)

Place_of_Design

Richard_Webster wrote: »

Trouble is that some sellers wouldn't realise that that kind of thing needed to be checked and months later wonder why sale is not progressing.... (Of course this can happen with some estate agents too.!)

I agree

Perhaps we are in a good position running a business from home and being in to answer the phone properly in office hours

we
1. Traced the chain via the estate agents
2. followed up by calling all of the solicitors to confirm details on the way down
3. Passed on the details to our buyers estate agent as a courtesy

We basically checked.
1. have the surveys been done
2. is the mortgage/finance in place

To be frank it was an eye opener, easier than we thought.. Many were surprised at our level of professioalism, efficency , and speed of sorting things out. All the estate agents and solicitors reacted by being professional and forthcomming with the results

We pretty much had the whole chain confirmed in 2 hours, at which point we accepted the offer

JQ.

Good work saving over £4k, however, what if the Estate Agent could have secured a sale price £10k more than you achieved - you've actually lost £6k. Just playing devils advocate really. Certainly the last 3 houses I've sold the EA has secured a price significantly above what we originally thought it was worth, after having done plenty of research myself. We've always used the same EA who has been fantastic - my view is that I pay an EA to negotiate the highest possible price, marketing the property is a small part of that process.