Do you want to hand over £1000s to an estate agency? Or do you feel confident enough to DIY? If so there are several viable options for cutting the cost of selling your home.
There’s a growing number of online Estate Agenciesthat promise to cut the cost of selling. Take MyOnlineEstateAgent.com. They’re charging a one-off flat rate fee of just £298.80 including VAT. What do you get for your money? A suite of professional photos, a floor plan of the property you’re selling and listings with a collection of well known online property portals, including the Rightmove site. You can request help setting a realistic sale price, get help dealing with enquiries and viewings, plus useful support with the negotiation side of things.
Pay a little more (£478.80 inc VAT) and you also get an Energy Performance Certificate for the property, a for sale board and a premium position on the Rightmove site, for greater visibility.
So how does this kind of service stack up to regular Estate Agency fees? Agents on the high street usually charge anything from 1.5% – 2.5% plus VAT. Which means if your home sells for £160K you’d pay anything from £2,880 to £4,800 for the priveledge… a huge difference.
Of course you can track down even cheaper ways to sell your home. Some websites offer packages for as little as £179 inc VAT for a basic DIY deal, with the chance to upgrade and get professional photography plus a ‘for sale’ sign. Others ask for a monthly payment of as little as £99 plus VAT, which you pay every month until you sell your home. Which is an excellent deal as long as you sell quickly!
It’s entirely possible to sell your home completely independently, at no cost whatsoever, if you take your own photos, advertise off your own bat and do your own marketing. It depends how much time, effort and energy you can dedicate to the project.
Sarah Beeny, the TV property expert, has a site where you can upload details if your home at no cost, with no commission to pay. It’s called tepilo.com and you can buy, sell or let property for free, right acoss the UK, with expert advice thrown in. It’s billed as extremely simple to use, taking the mystery out of the property selling process. The site is full of excellent, trustworthy advice including tips to get a better selling price for your home. Best of all, you do the negotiations through the site so you’re in complete control of the process.
You can also buy books about DIY estate agency. Try Tony Booth’s popular publication, Save Thousands Selling Your Own Home: Learn an Estate Agent’s Secrets and Make More Money Selling Your House Yourself. Here’s a link to the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Save-Thousands-Selling-Your-Home/dp/1857038266.
(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/alexkalina for the excellent free image)
