First time seller - advice please!

googler

UsernameAlreadyExists wrote: »

... good question. I'd consider selling it myself, but I, and my partner, work normal office hours so I can't really field phone calls,emails, and arrange viewings, but I could employ a person to do that for me, short term, and probably from the comfort of their own home - so very little in the way of premises overheads.

I think the value of the house itself is unrelated, it's the same amount of work. So a flat fee, rather than a percentage, should apply. Selling a £3M house is not worth 10 times more than a 300K house, which in turn isn't 10 times more than a 30K (err, can you even buy property for 30K these days?) ... you get my drift.

If I can sell the house with 2 weeks of elapsed "effort" (spread over a longer period), then perhaps £1K ? If it drags on and on, and on ... then maybe a little more?

You haven't really thought this through, have you?

What if the sale extends beyond the 'short term'? And you do realise all the financial implications of 'employing someone' in the business sense, as an EA or any other business has to do, as opposed to you merely getting a friend or freelancer to help out? Payroll, health insurance, pension, maternity, etc.? What's the advantage of employing a freelancer to do viewings for you if they have no experience of actually viewing and selling houses on a regular basis? Yes, it's cheaper to have one freelancer selling your one house, but one of the main advantages of having yours in the same place as all the others that the EA has is that if someone phones about one house, and realises that one isn't suitable, the EA will try and match another one to them. Individual freelancers won't do that. If you have 30 freelancers selling 30 houses, they won't know about each other.

You may think the house value is unrelated, but what would you fix the flat fee at, without penalising those with lower-value houses?

To take your example, if the EA has £3M, 300K and 30K houses to sell, and they currently charge 1%, with a minimum of £2500, that's 30k + £3000 + £2500 = £35.5k. In order to make the same fee over these 3 sales, a flat fee would need to be (35.5 / 3) £11,800 - how can you hike up the fees for the lower-value houses from £3000 and under to £11,800? Yes, it's an extreme example, but the same applies with realistic figures. Fix an 'average' flat fee, and, compared with the current percentage-based scenario, those with high value houses will have lower fees, and those with lower-value houses will see their fees go up. Only those with average priced houses will see their fees stay the same.

You propose charging a 'bit more' if things drag on; how do you think the public would react if EAs started charging more the longer the house was on the market? There's houses on the market that have been languishing for over a year due to the mortgage shortage.....

Hoof_Hearted

Most houses sell through Internet advertisements now. I thoroughly recommend an online agent who will do everything, except viewings, for around £500. Save absolutely loads of money. Online agents seem to manage with a flat fee.

Googler has a vested interest as he is an agent but rarely declares this.

googler

Hoof_Hearted wrote: »

Most houses sell through Internet advertisements now. I thoroughly recommend an online agent who will do everything, except viewings, for around £500. .... Online agents seem to manage with a flat fee

Hoof regularly posts immediately or a couple of posts after I do, merely to take issue with my posts, and repeating the same mantra every time.

Online agents manage with a flat fee because they charge it upfront, in the main, and they keep the upfront fee regardless of whether the house sells or not. They don't provide anything on a 'free' basis, such as EAs providing 'free appraisals' will do.

They don't carry the same risk as EAs operating on a no-sale, no-fee, payable-at-conclusion basis.

UsernameAlreadyExists

@Hoof Hearted: I was beginning to suspect as such given his stance and justifications.

UsernameAlreadyExists

googler wrote: »

They don't carry the same risk as EAs operating on a no-sale, no-fee, payable-at-conclusion basis.

^^ this is a self imposed business model though! Why should "easy" transactions and "higher value" transactions be penalised because of the risks you chose to accept in the first place?

I am actually beginning to wonder the future of the whole concept of EAs business model as the world is changing. The bit they do provide which can't yet be replaced is bums on seats answering phones, and walking people around properties ... and for that, I still think £2.5K is far too high a price to pay.

Hoof_Hearted

Online agents do arrange viewings but just don't conduct them. Viewer rings them and they ring you to arrange a convenient time.

Some agents get the needle when I can demonstrate that a high street agent's £7,200 inc VAT turned into £400 for me with Housenetwork (gone up a bit since). But, of course, the extra £6,800 would have been well worth paying for all those extra services -- i.e. viewings.

googler

Hoof_Hearted wrote: »

Online agents do arrange viewings but just don't conduct them. Viewer rings them and they ring you to arrange a convenient time.

So they don't participate in the viewing, don't interact to any extent with the prospective buyer, and are unable to get any meaningful impression of how one or more viewers regard the house, the area, and the market in general, then....? They just use the phone. Miles away from the house concerned. With no real knowledge of the house, its location, the area in general.

If an EA views more than one house with a viewer, in person, they get an impression of the viewer's tastes and preferences, and are able - even though the viewer may not have expressed an interest in, or seen, another house they have on offer - to direct the viewer toward others that may suit them. Others have said on this forum that from past experience as EAs, they've found that the majority of their buyers didn't actually buy the house that they first expressed an interest in, but were redirected to the one they bought by the EA.

Operating from remote call centres doesn't cut it, in my view. Having hired an EA to sell a house, because I don't want the hassle of the phone calls from buyers during the working day, that would then be replaced with calls from the online agent's call centre, you suggest..... that's what I'd be trying to get away from!

Some agents get the needle when I can demonstrate that a high street agent's £7,200 inc VAT turned into £400 for me with Housenetwork (gone up a bit since). But, of course, the extra £6,800 would have been well worth paying for all those extra services -- i.e. viewings.

Yes, but that's just your one isolated example, and as I pointed out to you before, your house was sold at way above the UK average house price, and was situated just outside the M25. The figures won't be the same for the £75k terraced in Swansea or North Shields.....

adamzetec

I feel the same about paying £2k+ in fees to an estate agent so went down the online estate agency route. My house was advertised for a month on October with little to no interest so I took it off the market for the Christmas period to go back on at the end of January.

If you accept that they don't have a book of clients and they won't be chasing clients on your behalf then it could work well. Depends how quickly you want to sell your house.