Yes it’s me again with yet another ‘work out my life’ question! So the boyfriend has been offered the job outside Ulverston and my plan was to rent out my flat, however, my financial advisor and now my parents have decided it makes more sense to just sell it on rather than risk the more income from a rental. Trying to decide whether to go with a regular estate agent who quoted me £1800 to sell or an online type where you end up doing most of the work yourselves. The plus of a regular estate agent is getting them to do all the viewings, even though I’ve had my first jab there is zero evidence as to how effective it is for immune supressed so I’m not prepared to do all the viewings myself and want to just go to my boyfriends while they happen. On the other hand I’d like more money in my pocket with an exit fee already to pay. Has anybody done it both ways? positive experiences of online? Spent ages trying to sell online and swapped and sold immediately?

As a recent buyer:

a) I prefer to be shown around by an agent, as it’s easier to have an honest conversation about the pros/cons of a place with them and MrsIHN
b) My experience of online agents when trying to book viewings was consistently crap.

As a seller, I’ve always used an actual agent, mainly because of the points above.

Is Purplebricks still classed as online?

We used them to sell our house, was roughly half the price of the local agent. We check it out online first some PP people are apparently rubbish, others are good, the one in our area was good.

Pros
– He didnt really have a vested interest in controlling the market like the established bricks and mortar alternatives appeared to want to. ie local agents would control who could get to see houses, would not push when needed.
– Did our viewings as and when needed for us.
– We got to see details of who was viewing ie the request came to us first, not the agent.
– Good feedback loop ie viewers can leave comments online for you to view.

Cons
– erm actually struggling to think, other than they did try to push their own solicitors quite a lot.

I wouldnt go ‘traditional’ again.

Just to ask the question, is it really the right decision to sell it? I regret selling my flat when me and the missis bought a house. Will the rental income not cover the mortgage? Worth factoring in the costs to sell (and buy again later)

We used a traditional agent to sell our flat and bought through a well reputed and very busy locally based traditional agent. They have loads of buyers and sell their properties quickly.

As a seller:
Our agent was good, relatively expensive but earned their money.
They got viewings lines up over a short window, did some viewings, we did some and they negotiated the two interested buyers off each other to get us more money.
It was all negotiated and concluded in a week or so.

As a buyer:
the agent was crap and knew nothing about the property was always late and rushed us. Didn’t have keys to access the whole property (conservatory was locked from inside and we later found was completely unlocked form outside).

We were happy with the traditional way!

I don’t have a huge amount of time for estate agents, I think they represent very poor value given that most just seem to post the house online and wait for someone to buy it. When we were selling ours I suggested they proactively approach families who bought smaller houses from them within the last few years hoping they might be ready to trade up, the agent looked at me like I was an alien. I then went in to a couple of agencies when we were sitting on cash waiting to buy and they wouldn’t even take my details, they just told me to keep an eye on the website!

PB or Remax my be a nice halfway house, or could you go online and pay a friend or family member to do viewings?

A lot of this will depend on how easily you expect your house to sell.

Final thought though, I’ve never paid standard fees to EA. They default to somewhere between 1% – 1.5% fees. Haggle that down or get them to drop marketing fees. I’ve saved around £500 each time I’ve sold by agreeing lower fees with agents. If they won’t negotiate, go elsewhere.

a) I prefer to be shown around by an agent, as it’s easier to have an honest conversation about the pros/cons of a place with them and MrsIHN

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!

When last searching for a house we viewed 35 of them. Only 1 or 2 knew anything about the house or area and had anything meaningful to add above what it said in the online advert.

We sold ours through House Network who are one of the most established online EAs, perfect service all round and for the other 2 people I recommended them to.

The high street EA who sold us our house were also abysmal. How they justify their fees is anyone’s guess. Absolute shysters all of them.

I would never ever ever touch a traditional high street EA again.

If you can possibly keep the flat then do so. If the rental will cover the mortgage then its a free ( to you) asset and only going to increase in value.

Only you really can tell if its worth the risk / hassle and if the numbers add up but i would certainly be in no hurry to sell.

Another vote for “keep the flat if you can” – in the long run the house I could’ve sold is going to be paying my pension

Thanks for the sensible suggestions of keeping it, however, we’ll be moving to the South Lakes and the flat is in the West Mids. I never chose to live here and if it all went belly up I’d not be coming back here as I only moved here for a relationship in the first place. The income would only be £2k for the year assuming the costs associated with it for the year can stay below the tax of £1200 so it will only take something to break or a renter to take the mick and any profit would vanish. Then there’s all the fees for checks etc. and it’s just not worth it in our opinion. If my finance guy says get rid, then I get rid!

Having also been through the process recently it varies massively on who the people are.
The agents we bought through were great and really earned their cost.
We viewed with an online agent who sent someone to the property. Couldn’t get away from there any faster. Had no interest in showing us the house and made us feel the house was not for us. The same person was also selling a friends house who ended getting much below market value. Make of that what you will.

I would always go traditional but do my homework as the agent we sold with were very bad.

Recent experiences make me say

A good local agent I emphasize the good part.

Booking with some of the online ones was awful and if your (the vendor) not their to show people round it was even worse

The income would only be £2k for the year assuming the costs associated with it for the year can stay below the tax of £1200 so it will only take something to break or a renter to take the mick and any profit would vanish.

Not trying to change your mind, as you are right there is hassle and risk with retaining a rental place. But…if we had kept my wife’s flat (purchased for £36k, sold for a bit more but not much) within 10 years it was sold for £250k. If we had kept our old house (bought for £56k, sold for £250k which seemed a lot at the time) 7 years later it went for £700k.

Just saying

Yeah I agree but with capital gains tax they would rob you of 18% of that! I dont see the price of a 2 bedroom flat soaring through the roof massively. Then we’d have increased stamp duty because I already had a property as well. Maybe if it was central London!

During this pandemic, Hybrids and onlines have increased market share. But. It doesn’t matter what type of agent you use as long as they are likely to sell your property in a reasonable time vs price achieved. It could be that your local Purple Bricks agent is the one to do that. A very “fag packet” way to determine this is to have a drive round the apartment blocks locally and see who has the most boards out. An agent that’s good at winning instructions from vendors doesn’t guarantee they are good at converting to sales but it’s a good start.

I sold one recently using 99home, which basically gets you on Rightmove for £99.
Did all 2 viewings myself, 2nd person bought it.

We looked at an online estate agent (Purple Bricks) Buying through them was a good experience, with the booking of viewings and messaging with the sellers via the app. One offputting factor was that they were not ‘no sale no fee’.

As a buyer, I much prefer being shown round the property by the owner as they know all the details.

We’ve only sold once which was using a local estate agent. Based on that experience I would probably use them or similar again. Yes they charged more but I felt they earned it and achieved a higher price than if we’d tried to save money using an online agent.

Perhaps it depends on the local housing market, but if demand is high, a good agent will get loads of viewings lined up and offers on the table quickly, which naturally pushes the price up.

They also did an awful lot of viewings in a short space of time, and then followed up each one with a phone call to invite offers and arrange second viewings. It’s a significant amount of work that needs doing well and I wouldn’t even consider doing myself.

So while I dislike giving money to them, and as a buyer i have had some bad experiences, I felt we were better off using them than not.

Yeah I agree but with capital gains tax they would rob you of 18% of that!

Maybe stop thinking of tax as theft and the world might be a better place?
But on a lighter note, we bought and sold seven years ago and if it hadn’t been for the estate agents at both ends it would have fallen through. They were both brilliant, as of course they should be, they’re getting a commission after all.

Or perhaps stop thinking that every comment typed online is a genuine reflection of someone’s thoughts and beliefs of an assault on yours. Maybe it’s as simple as someone just flippantly using a turn of phrase?

I kept my flat despite moving on ages ago, it ticks on regardless and is part of my pension. Cgt at 18 and 28% is a tax on profit so i get to keep 82 and 72% of the gain.

Letting regs are getting tougher but it’s all tax deductible.

I was dead set on selling it but my good friends and family told me keep it, looking back it’s the best thing I ever did.

As others, with hindsight I would have done similar and let my first house out. Bought for £42k and would have been paid off in full years ago. That type of house currently gets about £1300 a month in rent in that location and would sell for around £260k now. If I could successfully kick myself I would.

House Network has ceased trading I think: https://propertyindustryeye.com/mystery-deepens-over-house-network-collapse-and-then-sale/

99home sounds interesting.

I am also interested in this as in a similar situation to OP though only moving round the corner. Thing I am not sure on those recommending keeping a first property is how this makes financial sense if you are paying loads of interest on a new house, not to mention the second property tax that means the first years rental income would just about equal.

Yes retaining your old property pushes you into the 3% supplementary sdlt for your onward purchase. I am a non resi so get whacked with a further 2% now.

Sad really when I bought I only paid the flat 1%, the same purchase now I would be paying 20x the sdlt.

At least the govt spend money efficiently….ha ha.

How did this go in the end? I’m looking at selling my flat now, and I’m happy to take on some of the work myself (I can take the photos and do the viewings etc quite happily). The only thing I can’t do easily is get a listing on RightMove, which is a real barrier to getting the biggest audience.

I had an estate agent from Purple Bricks here yesterday, who seemed trustworthy and that they knew what they’re talking about (a very rare combination for an estate agent in my experience), but because I’m in Cambridge they want to charge me £500 extra, and an all my costs would be upfront otherwise there’s more fees. So I’m not as keen on them as I had been earlier in the week.

Has anyone else had experience in selling their property themselves? Do you lose out in the long run, or are the agents over charging? Suggestions would be apprecaited!

Online user – worked fine for me.

They did photos and rightmove ad (using my wording), took caller details and passed to me to call/arrange viewings etc.

Cons
– I had to do all chasing up and all viewings (bear in mind a lot of people /you are working/not working but there was only 1 caller I couldn’t manage to arrange a mutually convenient time with) and surprisingly just 1 eejit out of about 15.

Pros
– I think it cost £190 + vat(Berkshire).(sorry it was a while ago now , I think it was a house network start up offer) but at that level (estate agent was over 3k) I decided it was worth a punt, not quite throwaway money but in house buying moving terms it’s peanuts.

– I didn’t have to deal with estate agents, e.g. (*true previous experience), “we’ve got a cash buyer for your house if you can drop a bit”, ok – as long as it’s quick, “it’s cash it’ll be easy”, silence silence, silence, chasing, it turned out they would have the cash once they’d sold their dead grans house which had major structural issues. R soles.

If its a house that should be straightforward to sell the online agent for sure. anything out the normal estate agent

Estate agents charge ridiculous fees for what they do

I guess it depends on where the property is. We live in Stafford and do a bit more buying and selling than most as we have a few rental properties. The agents we’ve used have been brilliant in moving things along with solicitors, local searches, lenders, others in the chain etc. And the agent we use for letting is first class too, although we’ve used a different one for selling and some buying. Everybody seems to know each other – in a good way.
I guess in a city things would be different.
Being a landlord is OK too, as long as it’s a nice home in a nice-ish neighbourhood and you choose your tenants well.

I ended up going with a proper estate agent and paying the fees, I was mainly swung by the fact that the agent in question had sold the most recent flat on the exact same estate a matter of weeks beforehand. It sold to one of the first two people to view it and it completed after 2 months. Agents fees were £1800 but I’d happily recommend them again as they were on the ball throughout the process and chased it up plenty for me. As soon as I met the owner, I said now don’t ring me constantly chasing me for a decision, if I want to use you then I’ll call and he respected that and never kissed ass to me. In light of how crazy the market is and how quickly things are selling I might consider going online as I think it may sell easily and could save yourself a fair amount.

By far the largest number of our interactions with estate agents has been with renting my old flat out, we’ve used three and the consistent lack of competence has been startling.