Sell your own property

Perhaps the single biggest reason why homeowners have traditionally used an estate agent to sell their home, rather than do it themselves, relates purely to marketing - getting the property details in front of a sufficiently large number of buyers to achieve a sale. Nevertheless, there is in fact no legal requirement to use an agent at all.

Even under a "sole agency" agreement, there is nothing to prevent a homeowner from advertising and selling the property privately...*

...with no liability to pay commission if he /she ultimately finds a buyer without the help of their agent. Since the introduction of the Unfair Contract Terms Act, it is very rare now to find the term "sole selling rights" in an estate agent's consumer contract, meaning that individuals are free to market the property themselves - even where they have appointed a sole agent.

The Internet provides the perfect medium for the DIY homeseller to advertise his or her home at very low cost. Recent surveys by the Halifax and others have shown that more buyers than ever (over 70%) are using the Internet to search for properties for sale, so all you need is the means to get your home out there. You don't have to have a computer to get your home on the Internet as there are many services which offer the private seller a complete access package. But being on the Internet by no means guarantees that the property advertised will actually be 'visible' to the many-millions of buyers now surfing the net for homes.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of sites that promote themselves as allowing a vendor to sell their home privately for little or no cost...

...but, before choosing a 'free to advertise' Internetproperty service, homeowners need to consider carefully what they are likely to get 'for nothing'. It can work - it is theoretically possible to connect to the right potential buyer - but the fact is that this remains an unlikely possibility with many of the sites available.

The problem is that most 'free' sites are poorly marketed (due to inadequate budgets) and rely either on advertising for their profit (which gets in the way of the message and can be off-putting to buyers) or worse, selling-on registered users' e-mail addresses to junk mailing services - again this is likely to put off the majority of buyers searching for property from using such sites - the very target audience a seller needs. The biggest most well-known 'free to advertise' Internet service, until recently, relied for its profits upon selling its customer mailing list. Despite substantial backing which allowed it a multi-million pound advertising budget, it was forced to withdraw its free service, because it was unable to make a profit on that basis (!). Not entirely unexpected, they fell victim to the over-enthusiastic optimism surrounding the dot-com bubble.


Many sites offer to list homes for the do-it-yourself seller, with photographs, for sale boards and other bells & whistles supplied for various fees - so how do you choose? Like any marketing, it's all about EFFECTIVE VISIBILITY - just being on the net is not enough in itself - to stand any chance of being noticed your property must be in the RIGHT PLACE and WELL PRESENTED.

*A note of caution - not all private sites offer the same type of service even though they may appear outwardly similar. Many sites have merely copied and recycled the business concept of an existing high profile service, without fully understanding the legal implications. There are numerous examples of so-called private advertising sites, offering the type of property services which would in fact make them 'estate agents' in the eyes of the law and as such are likely to cause their customers considerable problems with an existing estate agent (despite their claims to the contrary). Therefore it is essential to choose a well-established professional company if the advertising is to be used alongside an agent.

Look first for a site which offers nationwide service to sellers anywhere in the UK and, most importantly, is able to attract buyers in all areas of the UK. Consider how well the property particulars are presented. How easy is it to find and search the website database? Is 'real person' telephone support provided? Are calls made on a freephone number (0800) or charged at national rate (0870 numbers - the site makes money on your phone call...)? How easy is it to obtain further information or ask questions, are queries handled swiftly and efficiently and staff helpful and knowledgeable? Is the website well-designed, attractive and easy to use thus encouraging buyers to return again and again? How well connected is the site to the property market in general? How long has the service been established and how professional is it by appearance and in practice?

Don't expect much in the way of service or response to your advertising on a site, if you pay nothing or very little. Or is that just common sense?

Some companies offer to build simple websites dedicated to just your property, in order to advertise it for sale on the web. This is probably a costly waste of time unless you have time on your hands to actively market the website address yourself. The Internet property world is an extremely crowded one and search-engine /directories may not find and categorise a new website for months (if at all), so chances are few buyers will ever get to see your dedicated website. Better to piggy-back o n the multi-million pound marketing budgets of the industry's biggest players by using an established property service.

Most Internet buyers are now being channeled by massive TV and press marketing campaigns to a handful of household name high profile property-search services, two of the largest being Assertahome and Fish4 - these are 'portal' databases of properties held by estate agents; normally the only way to get your property listed with these major players is by signing up to an agent's commission contract.

However, one private service, quaintly named " The Little House Company ", has negotiated very low cost arrangements to publish their customers' properties on these and many other portals, charges a fixed fee for any property from just £89 and can be found at www.thelittlehousecompany.co.uk . Compared to one-off advertising (say in a local paper), their service offers huge ongoing exposure in the mainstream market at low relative cost.


They have publishing contracts with the leading UK property portals, Assertahome and FISH4 and the prestige national contract for direct property sales on Homes & Property, the property channel of Associated Newspapers Group - Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, London Evening Standard, which is promoted to over 10 MILLION readers in the UK through the groups online and offline publications. In all, The Little House Company properties can be viewed on more than 150 leading UK property websites, including Propertyfinder, DailyMail.co.uk, MailonSunday.co.uk, Channel4.com, SKY TV and NTL cable interactive. Property listings also appear on the leading UK Internet service providers, Yahoo!, AOL, Wanadoo (formerly Freeserve) and BTopenworld. The fish4homes database is available on over 135 local newspaper websites around the UK and homes listed on Fish4 also appear on MSN, Yahoo, Altavista (three of the most popular search engines) and the interactive TV channels on Telewest and NTL cable.

An interesting point revealed by recent market surveys is the fact that buyers actually prefer to deal with the seller direct, rather than through an agent - the Halifax survey found that buyers have greater confidence in what a seller tells them about the property than what an agent says .

Further information of possible interest can be found on the web site:
www.thelittlehousecompany.co.uk