Estate Agent is coming around to value this evening..

SkintMonkey

what should I expect? Are they just going to wonder around and then tell me what my house is valued at? Never sold before, so not sure what will happen...

lynzpower

Expect this.

I had threee round, so buy the third I knew exactly what the format would be. I guess it depends on the layout of your place, but mine wanted a good look round first. mines a flat so its a line, ending in the lounge through the hallways, feels quite natural to end there

They came with a natty little laser measurer and took notes of all the rooms ( eg is that storage heating? Do you have gas? Is this solid or laminate flooring etc)

we got to the garden & lounge once everything was measured, and they sat down and gave the the "let me tell you about the company" spiel. Cue presentation of brochures, leaflets, pages from property mags, adverts in local papers. then comes the discussion of the fee & the valuation. Id already decided to give House network a stab in any case tho, so I just sat patiently throughout this pitch. If you have decided which EA to go for, ask as many questions as possible, especailly in terms of progressing the sale, who they contact, what the updates will be and how, would you only have one point of contact etc?

Personally I would always advocate getting 3 EAs round and seeing what they say. 2 of mine were rouglhy the same give or take 2k, the other was 50k lower, and said hed get mew a buyer within days ( er course you willl if you are marketing well below market value!!)

And then say youll think about it and you have other EAs round. LAter whe youve decided who you want to market the place, then time to play hardball in terms of fee lots of info about negotiating this in the stickies at the top of the page

Good luck x

Robert_Sterling

They usually ask you what you think it is worth.

SkintMonkey

Robert_Sterling wrote:

They usually ask you what you think it is worth.

Do they? Is it advisable to suggest something a bit higher than perhaps you are thinking of?

lynzpower

SkintMonkey wrote:

Do they? Is it advisable to suggest something a bit higher than perhaps you are thinking of?

if they ask that tell them to stuff off why should YOU do THEIR job for them

richj

Don't go with the one who says it has a higher value. They often say this to get you to sign up, and then after a few weeks you have to drop the price. Do a bit of research and find out what the houses nearby went for. There is a web site but I can't remember it.

good luck Rich

arthur_dent_2

This is the site which has the recent sales values:

nethouseprices.com

I believe that there is a link to it via the main MSE site. Go into the general section, then into the council tax section and it is in the bit about is your house correctly banded.

tigerminxy

As advised before, if the agent asks you what you think it's worth, you may want to think twice about using them. If the agent is worth their salt, they will be able to tell you about properties they have sold or which are on their books in the same area and/or are the same type of property. Even if they haven't sold any around that area (and that should raise alarm bells), they should have had the nouse to check the Land Registry data to see what the going rates are.

In terms of which agent to go for, take into account what their track record is like around the area, what their fees are and what you get for your money. At the minimum you want a listing on something like Rightmove. For my recent house sale we went for the one who provided the floor plans, simply because we felt it would reduce the number of time-wasting viewings.

We negotiated the fees by playing the agents off against each other. We gave sole agency to one agent for 6 weeks and if the property wasn't sold by then, we would have gone multi-agency but with the same commission rate. This obviously gives the initial sole agent an incentive to get an acceptable offer within 6 weeks.