How to Sell Homes Privately Online Using The Internet
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.
Fact: There is no legal requirement to use an agent at all. You can use a private house sales website like The Little House Company and at the same time market your home with an estate agent. We are simply a dedicated advertising service that helps homeowners sell property online directly themselves.
Fact: There is no legal requirement to use an agent at all. You can use a private house sales website like The Little House Company and at the same time market your home with an estate agent. We are simply a dedicated advertising service that helps homeowners sell property online directly themselves.
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 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.
Private house selling explained
1) Buyers contact the seller directly via secure email system
2) Sellers supply further information at the request of potential buyer
3) Only after the buyer has all relevant information viewings are arranged directly.
4) The seller conducts the viewing (Don't they anyway)
5) Offers are made direct to the seller (Easier than using 3rd party)
6) When an offer is accepted, it should be put in writing confirming the price.
7) Both parties to exchange legal representative details and the legal process that will protect you begins.
Sell Property for Free?
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' internet property 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 offputting 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 most well-known 'free to advertise' internet property portal, 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.
Using classified ads to sell property
Placing a free advert is great when you do not have to pay high prices to feature the property advert or to continually pay to bump it up in the listings. Properties tend to take longer to sell and using a free ads site can end up being
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 yourself. The internet property world is an extremely crowded one and search-engines /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 on the multi-million pound marketing budgets of the industry’s biggest players by using an established property service.
Buyers love owners
An interesting point revealed by 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.
Author : Nick Marr
