Just wondered if anyone knew about this kind of thing?
My sister has had three estate agents to look at my mother’s house.
Belvoir say put the house for sale at £250,000 and they take a fee of £1750+VAT.
Purple Bricks say advertise at £300,000 hoping to get £285,000. £1200 in fees.
Connells say £225,000 but do online auction to get £240,000, buyer pays 1.5% fee.
No chain on the house ( my mother has gone into a care home) although it needs a lot of minor works. We need a relatively quick although not urgent sale. My sister, brother and I part own the house with my mother so the more it goes for the more we get although if it doesn’t sell quickly we’d end up subsidising care home fees until it did as her savings run out in a few months.
As I’ve not sold a house for 24 years the options are a bit lost on me. The things that concern me are that Purple Bricks seem overly optimistic and it might not sell quickly enough. The idea of an online auction seems worrying as we might end up selling it low.
That leaves Connells which is the highest fee although in the scheme of things that’s a bit of a drop in the ocean.
In practice we need the estate agents to do a good job including showing people around as none of us are local or have much time to do anything.
Ta.
Tipton is a small fishing village in the borough of Sandwell.
Comments
With a “real” estate agent they should take care of all the viewings and try to promote and sell the house for the best price.
In many areas it’s a buyers market and estate agents are out of touch.
We also negotiated a reduced exclusive contract time, and an open house day. That meant they put a lot of work in early to ensure they got the buyer quickly it risk us going elsewhere and them not getting a fee.
We didn't haggle about fees because we wanted to ensure a quick sale. They were the highest value sale price too if all the agents we saw.
Use someone local, who can show you details of similar properties very close by they have sold recently. This will ensure they have an active database of current buyers in that price range. It also gives an indication they might know what they are doing.
Find out who does their viewings; who will be dealing with enquiries on your property? is it proper, experienced sales staff or Saturday part-timers.
On fees, be happy to pay a reasonable fee. It has to be worth the agents while - they will typically get between 5 and 15% of the commission. Agents will take instructions at reduced fees, but will feel more motivated to be proactive for the instruction paying a better fee. It is human nature. There is no harm in having a performance related fee, where you have a fixed percentage up to the price level where you would be pleased to sell, then an increased level above that. Everyone wins that way.
Almost as important as choosing a good agent, get a good Conveyancing solicitor, on recommendation only, instructed before marketing commences. Get the property information forms filled in and instruct the solicitor to produce a package of all the information the buyer will require, including the local authority search. This will minimise the time of vulnerability between a sale being agreed and exchange if contracts, which is the point where the seller can relax. This reduced timescale minimises the opportunity for buyers to withdraw.
Connells is a large, well resourced agent and one of the more successful ones. I would be tempted to use them, with a conventional sale method and a short agency agreement, putting the pressure on them to come up with a buyer quickly.
good luck.
We didn't have to sell the house while my dad was in the home, but we've had three estate agents come to value it subsequently for probate purposes. I can't offer advice on how to pick the right estate agent - I should find that out quite soon - but it feels much better to deal with someone who seems to know the local market.
I had another word with my sister and she’s leaning to Belvoir as she felt they seemed to have the better local knowledge and generally more helpful, less pushy.
@GuyR we’ll have to have another discussion re a conveyancing solicitor, I hadn’t even thought about that.
My father died nine years ago and my mother was terrified of ending up in a care home. She had some mini strokes about 18 months ago and ended up spending a fortune on carers. Then she broke her ankle, ended up in hospital and went into a care home after hospital. Which she now loves, people to talk to, entertainment,etc, doesn’t know why she didn’t do it sooner...
EDIT: Dont pay the going rate for commission. There is always wiggle room
Did you ever see any of the TV shows about this sort of thing, staging the house to sell is another thing
My brother in law has been removing the stair lift as apparently they are a huge turn off. The local scrap people have it now and he's put all the old bannisters back in place.
If anybody wants to know how to lose a lot of money quickly buy a stair lift!
My mother liked the idea of renting it ( so that she could go back one mythical day) but no one really has the time to do everything that would entail and the income wouldn't be huge. It's a suburb of Wolverhampton with okay schools, not near the university or any big employers so there isn't really a rental market there so I suspect it would just be delaying the inevitable. My brother manages my mother's finances and he is in his sixties and unwell so he wouldn't want to be involved in any long term plans.
Of your three options I’d take Belvoir. Firstly if they’re local they’ll have better knowledge of what properties will really achieve. Secondly £250k is a step off point to a higher stamp duty rate so it’ll attract more potential buyers if you keep it there or even marginally under. Lastly, that’s a decent commission rate. We had our place valued last week. Agents round our way want at least 1% plus vat, one lot are asking 3% (and wildly overvalued the place compared to the others, presumably to cover their stupid commission fees).
I wouldn’t touch Purple Bricks. Two people in our road have tried to sell with them recently and both changed to a conventional agent pretty sharpish. They tend to overvalue and one neighbour said they were useless when it came to organising viewings.
One of my my friends has had a complete nightmare with renting their house here (they live in France). The tenant defaulted on the rent, it took them six months to get the guy evicted and when they finally got the house back they found it’d been completely trashed.
I'm not locked in here with you, you are locked in here with me.