Selling house without estate agent

Woby_Tide

MissMotivation wrote:

Once again.....I post here in a personal capacity and not on behalf of my company!

ok so as a good estate agent in your personal experience what does it actually cost(in basic figures as detailed in prevuious posts what the agent actually does) to sell a house on average, ignore the sell on first viewing or trashy places that end up having to go via all the agencies for peanuts

Doozergirl

...Thing is, this is MoneySavingExpert and someone has asked about selling without an estate agent, not the reasons why they should use one.

The head honcho of the agent I use most drive a nice Porsche Cayenne and you can clearly tell who he is by his registration plate. Maybe his staff don't believe it's a lucrative business, but his cover is well and truly blown as far as I'm concerned!

As estate agents aren't a charity, perhaps some of the profit used to buy that Porsche could have stayed in his customers pockets if they got up and asked the question that the OP has.

Jorgan_2

I'm an EA, part of the problems with 'no sale-no fee' is that for every completion we get paid on, which may seem a lot, we have to factor in every abortive sale we deal with, the marketing costs of every property that is withdrawn from sale, cover the costs of sending people out to value proeprties for people that are curious to their properties value or have no intention of using our services, only our knowledge of property prices.

There are something like 2 million properties put on the market every year, 1.2 -1.3 million actually complete. Therefore something like 700,000 properties are withdrawn from sale, the cost of marketing, time spent by staff on viewings/valuing them has to come from somewhere.

The only two ways I could reduce the fees we charge is to cut our level of marketing, when sellers have asked me to reduce my fee, I ask them which part of the service they don't want, accompanied viewings, internet advertising, newspaper adverts etc. The majority want everything. The second way is to start charging withdrawl fees or admin fees, if they have had the benefit of being marketed then why not pay for it if they take it off the market? This one is very unpopular.

On top of this there is the high street premises, staff costs, internet advertising, virtual tours, newspaper advertising, floor plans etc. Ten years ago we had our ads in the paper & mainly black & white photo copied (badly)details. We spend a lot more on advertising, colour adverts, colour details etc. The company I work for has a couple of offices & the fees for internet advertising run to a couple of thousand a month. As does newspaper adverising, it may not be the most effective marketing tool but all my vendors demand that there property appears at least every other week.

If kwiksave have gone bust its because they weren't bringing enough money in to cover the costs they incurred, simple economics.