Should we try and sell without estate agent in a slow market? Any experiences?

lynzpower

panda,

how many kids have you got , you have a 6 bed house there, are you sure you cant just stay put?

Doozergirl

lynzpower wrote: »

panda,

how many kids have you got , you have a 6 bed house there, are you sure you cant just stay put?

Sorry, but :rotfl:

pandapaws

:rotfl: Tell us about it!

That's exactly the point - only one and a bump kids at the moment and there definitely won't be any more than two, so we want something smaller!!! It isn't actually a particularly big house, just a decent sized 4-bed with a loft conversion, so suits us fine except that we only ever go up to the top floor to clean it! Need to reduce the mortgage a bit and move closer to work - currently DH and I each travel about 60 miles each every day and it is costing a fortune.

We didn't even want to buy the flippin thing in the first place - I didn't want a new-build, but this little development of 11 were the only detached houses for sale in the town at the time (apart from some dodgy Barrats on flood plain). Change of job location since but we're still stuck here!

Aaaaargh!:D

courtjester

Been with an agent and on Rightmove since February... what have you got to lose by trying private advertising?? The better sites charge just £100-£150 and if you sell, no commission, so really what's stopping you?

Note, if you go with an 'online agent' such as Housenetwork as per earlier post, this is *not* private selling. They are estate agents so will conflict with your existing agent, meaning you will end up paying both agents whoever sells it, not good. HN are only worth considering once you have expired your existing agent's contract properly, but...

... you've been on Rightmove for 7 months with no joy, and Rightmove are the only advantage HN have over the (much cheaper) private (self-advertising) websites that you can use alongside an agent.

Google "sell my house" to identify the leading services and ignore the sponsored ads top and right.

cells

you really have two choices from what i can see


1: stay there and keep living there for years to come.
2: drop the price

or the very long option, keep your house priced at £287.5k. Take a economics degree from oxford or Cambridge, getting a first class degree.
Work for a large bank for a while then apply to work for the bank of england. Once you are in the Bank of England, use your womanly body/charm to convince mervyn king to reduce interest rates by 1-2%.

I've just mentioned the idea of dropping to 250k to my husband, and he nearly had a fit! He doesn't think we should have dropped from the original 287k and if I'm honest I think he's right - the house is worth it

the house is only "worth" what someone is willing to pay, so far no one is willing to pay your asking price, so it is not "worth it."



you bought it for £248k, count yourself lucky if you sell it for £250k.

lynzpower

Im inclined to agree here, the price is only worth what someone else is willing to pay. However, if there are NO suitable buyers around ( and i dont know the earnings in your area at all...) then what can you do.

When you say "moving costs" if you sell privately, then your EA "fees" are practicvally nil, little house co is less than 100 quid etc. if you sold privately your asking price should reflect this, and thus be more attractive to buyers IYSWIM

WTF?_2

pandapaws wrote: »

I've just mentioned the idea of dropping to 250k to my husband, and he nearly had a fit! He doesn't think we should have dropped from the original 287k and if I'm honest I think he's right - the house is worth it. We just need the right person to come along, (or any person would be an improvement)! Spoke to a friend who's also selling in the area and she has only had one viewer in 14 months, and there really isn't anything wrong with her house either - as the agents keep telling us, it is just a very weak market at the moment.

Don't really know what to do - we were previously happy just to sit it out, but I'm now pregnant and don't want a repeat of last time which saw us moving into rented a week before the baby was due, and into our existing house 5 weeks later (Xmas eve!).

I think it bears repeating that the house is 'worth' only what the market will pay.

It may well have been 'worth' 287k at the peak of the market some time back, but clearly it isn't 'worth' that now under current conditions.

If you insist on asking more than the market value, it could be a very long time before you find a buyer. There's always the chance that someone will like it and pay over the odds but how long do you want to wait for?


Therefore either reduce the price to what the market will bear or keep living there until such a time as the market picks up and will support your asking price (could be quite a while but you never know, maybe there'll be one last burst of increasing house prices from money taken out of the stock market).

It just boils down to how much you want/need to move to a different location. You're quite lucky that there's no financial imperative on you to sell the house, you'd really be in a sticky situation if there were.