House sale - Rightmove

Vicx_2

Hi, newbie here in hope of advice!

Currently trying to sell my parents property that has been on the market for nearly 2 years. These are the second agents we have had and frankly they're as bad as the last! We have requested they retake some photos and update some wording (adding viewing advised, no chain) simple stuff really. Once the changes are made we requested they relist the property on their website and Rightmove to refresh peoples memories and to be seen by new buyers. A week later and the changes have just been made on the EA's website. Last week we were told we'd have to drop the price so rightmove would relist. We dropped it by £5 (EA wanted £100) today we are told RM have advised in order to relist the property on rightmove we need to drop the house price by 2%??? Which would mean an 11k drop??? I am struggling to see why RM would insist on this? Can't see the business sense for RM? EA obviously yes. For RM a fee to update would make much more sense. What difference would a houseprice be to them? Insisting on a drop in price seems weird! I suspect EA has more to do with this than they are letting on. Has anyone else come across this? How did you get around it?

please help!
thanks in advance
Vicx

GAH

Firstly the agent are spinning you a lie about rightmove. RM would never call the agent and suggest any such thing.

You Instruct the agent to market at what price you want it at, and you instruct the agent when you want to make reductions.

Agents update rightmove 1 of 2 ways, either through their software provider or manually (all agents have the ability to change the price manually, and the changes go live straight away on RM)

You also have every right to demand new photos and that the write up is accurate. Make an appointment for the Manager/Owner/Boss to come back round to the house so you can iron out these changes)

In addition to all of these marketing problems though, if the house has been on two years, it does sound as though it is priced incorrectly.

hcb42

It's on for over half a million and you dropped it a fiver??

I think they have told you a couple of porkies, but it sounds like a revised strategy is needed.

sooz

GAH is quite right, they are lying, Rightmove don't tell them what to do - the agents pay Rightmove to advertise.

Find another agent & sack the current ones for incompetance.

However, are you being very difficult over the price? 2 years is a long time, & to have only dropped the price by £5 is amusing, to say the least. No amount of banners telling viewers that 'viewing is advised' will change that. Perhaps they were trying to tell you something?

Doozergirl

I agree with the other posters.

a) If they create a new file for it on their own system it will upload to Rightmove as a new property. I actually think any change in price would bring it up as new, but then I've never dropped a house by £5, so perhaps they're right.
b) Even with a bad listing, in two years, someone would have taken the time to look at the details properly. The market is dropping back, albeit slowly, but if it was overpriced two years ago, it will be incredibly stale and even more overpriced now.

Would you post us a link of the property, see what can be done with it? You're new so can't post links properly but you could give us the link with a couple of spaces in it so it doesn't read like that, or give us the property number from the address bar in rightmove.

Vicx_2

Thanks guys, I'm reassured now about RM/EA I suspected I was being told stories. With regards to the house price its been a permanent issue from the start! It went on the market approx 2 years ago at £650k (on the advice of the EA as we inherited it we had no idea what the value would be, esp as my Grandmother had been there many years) we had an offer very early on of £575k which as you can imagine was a shock so declined, with hindsight we'd should have accepted! On the back of that EA requested we drop it to £625 which we did. No further viewings. We were then asked to drop it to £599k which is when we dropped the EA as they were doing nothing else to market it. The new and current EA priced again at £599k which is what they first marketed it at. We had another offer of around £585 from memory, accepted and was all going through until buyer couldn't get planning perm to do amendments so pulled out. property went back on at £585k but we have had no further offers. We're assuming the property is valued correctly now but can't really be sure given the history. To cover this we have added "Offers invited" to inform viewers that we are flexible. ((Banging head against wall)) lol

hcb42

you can share a link or tell us where to find if you want more advice, or more like a few people peering at the pics lol...

hindsight eh...

shisslemopp

The others are correct, pack of lies from you EA!

You don't even need to drop the price to get re-listed, all they have to do is change a photo, like a swap from the front image of the house, to an internal shot and that will then re-list the property as new to RM and be sent out again to all with alerts on.

Hope you sell it soon

0123jamesp

for a price reduction to be relisted as a new instruction you have to significantly drop the price.

Taking new photo's wont relist the property as new (as it is illegal to list a property as new after 2 weeks)

or you an take it off and stick it back on straight away (this is illegal)

spook

RM are insisting on a 2% drop in order to discourage people from doing what you want to do.

It makes perfect sense to me that RM would want to discourage relisting. It's basically gaming the system and it degrades the user experience.

Relisting will result in the following negative effects

* Users will receive a second, duplicate e-mail alert for the property
* Anyone who has 'saved' the property or added any personal notes on RM will lose them
* It messes up RM's statistics of how long properties have been on the market, etc.

I'm sure it does happen all the time, but perhaps your agent made the mistake of doing things the proper way and asking RM first.

I'm sure RM would much prefer that you(r agent) paid the extra cost for a premium listing instead...

Rockporkchop

How much are you willing to drop? If you really want to get rid of it you could just drop it to £550k or even lower. I know you want the best price but it didn't cost you anything and you are losing thousands in interest with it just sitting there.

How about offering to pay the buyer's stamp duty and making sure that stands out on Rightmove? Now the rate is 4% (so about £23k) it puts a lot of people off.

Why not post a link here, you will get a lot of viewers and maybe a potential buyer!