MONEY COMMENT
Be Your Own Estate Agent (Part One)

By Cliff D'Arcy
March 3, 2003

My wife and I are eager to move house, as our current home offers precious little room for our young son to run around without frequently bumping into things.

We've registered with several local estate agents, so the particulars of houses for sale have started to flood through our letterbox. As this will be our first house move, we're going to take our time and find a house that matches our checklist as closely as possible. We can afford to do this, since house prices are steady (and even falling) in our part of west London and, as we are trading up, this trend is to our benefit.

It's been a long time since I've been in an estate agent's office and was intrigued by one obvious message that emerged during my recent visits. Although estate agents are quite happy to add you to their lists of buyers, they all ask the same excited question, "And do you have a house to sell?" It was pretty clear to me that sellers were much more valuable than buyers (from whom they make nothing).

What also amazed me was the fees that agents charge for selling homes - up to 2.5% of the sale price; with VAT on top, this comes to 2.94%. A typical commission is around the 1.5% mark (1.76% including VAT). So, if I sell my home for, say, £265,000, the estate agent will receive a handsome commission of £4,671 for marketing my property and introducing prospective buyers to me.

According to hometrack, in my part of London, it takes around 4-5 weeks to sell a property, with an average of 14 viewings before a sale is agreed. Dividing the commission figure above by 14 gives £334 per viewing, which sounds pretty handsome to me! I don't want to pay an estate agent over £1,000 a week to sell my home, so I'm going to do it myself.

The first thing I did was surf over to the Office of Fair Trading to download a very informative leaflet, "Using an estate agent to buy or sell your home." This explains what estate agents do for their money and how to go about choosing one.

I then visited the National Association of Estate Agents and viewed their tips on showing your home in its best light. These two documents have helped me to decide on my next steps, which will be:

• Tidy up my house and garden, putting both are in good decorative order
• Get valuations from at least three estate agents
• Organise a survey (from a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) to give to prospective buyers and thus speed up the sale
• Find a solicitor to handle the legal side of the sale
• Measure and describe all the rooms (I worked in marketing for over ten years and, having lived in my home since 1993, I'm pretty sure I can describe it better than any agent - and without the typo's!)
• Produce single-page adverts with colour digital photographs for local newsagents' windows (my wife has a photography qualification, so she'll be our David Bailey)
• Take out adverts in the local newspapers
• Make a "For Sale" notice using laminated A4 pages
• Put an ad in the front downstairs window
• Build a simple website to give a virtual tour and room-by-room details (with the support of one of our helpful Fool techies)
• Set up an e-mailbox to automatically send our house particulars in response to e-mails from interested buyers
• Do the negotiating myself; having managed several motor finance clients, I honestly enjoy haggling!

With a small child, it will be hard for us to have viewings during weekdays, plus our family time at weekends is also very precious. Therefore, we'll only agree to viewings from serious buyers who can show that they can afford our full asking price and have a pre-approved mortgage offer.

I'll let you know how we get on in future articles.

More: Protect Yourself From Naughty Estate Agents | Homeowning Centre