Selling property privately

trekker12

Anyone done it?

I've got a flat for sale which I have until recently been letting out. I moved into my (now) wifes house three years ago so there is no onward chain, It's ready to move into.

I've had an ad in the local paper for the last few weeks but had limited interest so am now considering an online estate agent to get it on Rightmove etc.

There appears to be several options and variations in costs. Does anyone have any recomendations or experiance of pitfalls I should look out for?

slowbike

Capital Gains Tax ? ...

Might not be - but I thought the house had to be your primary residence for a duration for that not to be applicable ...
just something worth checking ...

bigmonka

I bought a house of some friends. The technical stuff was still done by conveyancers but they saved money by not needing to pay an estate agent. It was very easy (and quite refreshing as IME estate agents don't do a great deal once the sale has been agrred).

monkimark

I've yet to work out what it is that estate agents do for their money, I'm currently in the process of considering a move out of London and I've been told that 1% of the value of the house is a good deal and some estate agents apparently want to go for more like 3%!

Even for my relatively modest flat, that means I'd be paying some smug twit in a mini cooper thousands of pounds for opening the front door a few times to let people look round and uploading some photos to Rightmove - I could do that myself.
The estate agents we bought the place off were completely useless, held the entire sale up for months and in the process lost the seller £10,000 because we got sick of the whole shambles and dropped the offer price.

All of the technical stuff is done by solicitors, surveyors etc as far as I can tell and potential buyers must pretty much all come through rightmove/findaproperty etc these days.

pdstsp

Slowbike wrote:

Capital Gains Tax ? ...

Might not be - but I thought the house had to be your primary residence for a duration for that not to be applicable ...
just something worth checking ...

You always get the last three years of ownership allowed for principal private residence relief so long as you have lived there for some part of your ownership so you should be ok, given that the first £10,000 of gains are covered by your annual allowance, so you should be ok so long as it sells in reasonable time.

bernithebiker

In France the agents take between 3 and 8%, usually around 5%, and they are utterly useless.

On top of the 6% the government takes in tax, the house market is thus sucked dry of life and liquidity.

So yes, do it yourself, it's not hard. If you consider a UK agent's 2% (+VAT don't forget) on a 200 000 property then you have £4800 to play with, which buys ALOT of advertising, placards, hey, maybe even a daytime TV ad!

capt_slog

I sold mine privately about 25 years ago.

I put a board up outside at around 5:30, and by 7:30 I'd had someone come to look and make me an offer. It was that easy. I still had to go through all the legal stuff of course, which needs a solicitor unless you are really sure what you're doing. They handle all the stuff about the Land Registry.

I have heard that some estate agents don't want to know when you come to put in an offer for a house if your house isn't up for sale with an estate agent. They think it shows a lack of commitment to the process, which I can understand. Mine was a little different as I could say that I had a buyer when I was looking for the next house.

boydster76

I've bought privately after randomly meeting a guy on a golf course who was selling to move in with his new partner. He got three estate agent valuations, we agreed on a price somewhere in the middle and he then discounted the price by £10k to account for the fee savings he would make. I definitely got the better deal out of it as he passed all his savings on to me! The process was then very smooth and worked exactly as it would through an estate agent, but without the issues the agents can sometimes cause. The main benefit was that we were dealing directly with each other throughout so knew where we were with the process at all times.

I understand from a mate that private sales are on the increase as it is now a lot easier to self promote your property via the web.

monkimark

Capt Slog wrote:

I have heard that some estate agents don't want to know when you come to put in an offer for a house if your house isn't up for sale with an estate agent. quote]

So they turn away potential buyers!
Another good reason to avoid the slimey blighters

boydster76

monkimark wrote:

Capt Slog wrote:

I have heard that some estate agents don't want to know when you come to put in an offer for a house if your house isn't up for sale with an estate agent. quote]

So they turn away potential buyers!
Another good reason to avoid the slimey blighters

An estate agent in Oxford recently told me that unless I was a cash buyer in rented accommodation, i.e. able to move immediately, then I wouldn't stand a chance in the current market as there are loads of cash buyers out there ready to snap up houses chain-free.

MountainMonster

I despise estate agents, they are the most useless and over-priced job I have ever seen. I got charged £400 about a year ago for legal fees to draft the contract for renting a property, and literally watched him open a template, type my name in, the address and a few small details then print it out for me to sign. That was a real eye opener. I'm only 24 and the prices in the UK are ridiculous.

trekker12

Thanks for the encouragement. You all basically agreed with my train of thought. I rented it privately with no issues so this is just the next step.

Anyone used online agents and have recomendations?

Of course if anyone is in need of a flat in South Essex near the M25 then let me know....

BigJimmyB

Where is it Trekker? I know someone who might be on the lookout...

He has a very definite area in mind though.

capt_slog

Estate Agents.

Yes, there are some sh1ts, but some of them also do a good job and do more than first meets the eye. I've been lucky enough to meet a good one......

When I bought my previous house, it was empty and had been for a while and the estate agent showed us around. We liked the look of the place and said so. He said, "take a walk over to that window and have a look out of it". I did so, and as I crossed the floor, the window got higher! The floor was sinking, it wasn't attached to the wall by that window as all the joists had rotted away from the wall..
"Clever of you to notice", said the estate agent "I'm prepared to knock £400 off the asking price for that"

I went back to the same chap when it came to sell the place about 10 years later and he handled the sale really well then too, juggling the problems of the prospective buyers to make the sale happen by working with their agents.

Pross

I've not done it myself and share the disdain most on here have towards estate agents but one thing I would say is that whenever I see a private 'for sale' sign on a house it tends to stay there longer than most estate agent signs in the same area. Marketing a house yourself has got easier with internet sites such as Rightmove but there are still a lot of people who will look in the estate agent window or local paper for their new house so potentially you aren't going to be showing it off to the whole market. I've only moved house once and we paid a fixed fee rather than a percentage, it was a sensible amount for the work they did but that was prior to the internet really taking off. I suppose the benefit of paying them a percentage is that it makes it worth their while getting you the best possible price.

madtam

Of course the percentage means it is the interests of the agent to get the best price but when we moved last time the agent we bought through was a bit of a pillock.
We viewed the house a couple of times, the first time with the agent, and the second time the owner was back and we met them. It turned out my wife knew the owner from many years ago and so we discussed things a bit more and agreed on the evening that we would buy at a reduced price (and the price had come down a couple of times already). The owner advised we would have to formally confirm the offer to the agent the following day. We did this only to get a big surprise when the agent called back a day later to advise our offer had been rejected as too low.
Of course we then phoned the owner direct to try and understand what was happening since we had agreed the price. The owner expressed surprise since the offer hadn't been put to them at all and it seemed the agent had decided that they would reject it without even checking with the person they were supposed to be acting on behalf of.

I didn't trust agents before that but it certainly confirmed my suspicions. I guess the agent felt that having the property on the books for a while longer and maybe charging for a few more flyers and adds was better than accepting the percentage of a lower price.