Contemplating selling at auction - any advice?

Orpheo

Sibley wrote: »

Let me guess. You work as a Bingo caller,earn the minimum wage, belong to House Price Crash website and think your first time buy ought to be a 4 bedroom detatched house on a nice estate for about £20,000?

That's it, show your best side, monkey boy.

Trollfever

Stolen from Merryn Somerset Webb, 29/01/08.

On the plus side you’ll have the interesting experience of finding out what it is really worth. An auction is the purest possible way of finding out the right price for something. There’s no PR, no careful marketing, no estate agent lies or manipulations, no ‘staging’ and no waiting for the ‘right buyer.’ There’s just a man with a hammer and a room full of potential bidders. And the price one of them eventually pays? That’s the market price – the right price for that house given the prevailing market conditions. I wonder if the Battersea penthouse would get £5m if it went to auction.

Casement_2

Thank you to everyone who provided practical advice. I know that selling at auction would be quite an unnerving thing to do, and we would have to have a reserve price we could live with (c£25k below current asking price, maybe, so I don't think we are being unduly complacent about what we could get). I really didn't want this thread to turn into an exchange of insults between the house-price-crash brigade vs slow-decline brigade, but I suppose that was only to be expected.

Regards.:A

Doozergirl

Casement wrote: »

Thank you to everyone who provided practical advice. I know that selling at auction would be quite an unnerving thing to do, and we would have to have a reserve price we could live with (c£25k below current asking price, maybe, so I don't think we are being unduly complacent about what we could get). I really didn't want this thread to turn into an exchange of insults between the house-price-crash brigade vs slow-decline brigade, but I suppose that was only to be expected.

Regards.:A

If you will accept £75k then I would seriously change the price with your existing agent to "offers over £75k" and then make sure you get a great load of marketing with it. Have them book an open day for you and create lots of competition - people always want something that somebody else wants and multiple viewings helps give this impression.

The benefit of this is that you will have people viewing who need mortgages which doesn't usually happen at auction; that keeps prices down. If £75k is cheap for the property then you will find yourselves in an auction situation where you have numerous offers and people subsequently trying to outbid each other. Your house will eventually sell for what it is genuinely worth.

You pay your fee to the agent and don't have to worry about insertion fees for the auction. You may not get immediate exchange but you can look for a buyer that will exchange quickly for you.

Also auction properties don't always get the marketing they deserve to the wider market.

GDB2222

Excellent advice from Doozergirl (as always!). I would just add that you can keep things hot by putting out contracts to more than one buyer - you'll exchange with whichever is ready first. You can always offer to refund half their fees to the loser.

tawse57

I think the suggestion of undercutting the competition by reducing the asking price is a good halfway between where you are and an auction.