Tut Towers sale.

[Shug]

Good to hear it's going to get filled up actually - probably be nearly as many kids as it had as a working school!

[Jeremy]

My experience in the past was always that a seller really needed access to the solicitors property centre in the area they were selling in, and the solicitors had really cornered that market. It would always have been my first (maybe only) port of call. Other Estate Agents always seemed to me to be on the periphery of things. In saying that, the guy from McEwan said they dont have a presence on the ASPC which surprised me a bit. I had always thought of web based EAs like Rightmove, S1 Homes and the like as an after thought but I guess things will have moved on.

Anyhow, as it happened I had a nice day in Aberdeen on Tuesday and enjoyed making myself lunch in the wee house so have decided to keep it

Remure,

I would agree with that 100% if you're talking about 20, 15, 10 years ago. In my experience the online portals have well and truly taken over. Certainly in Edinburgh and also appears to be the case down here in the Norwich area too.

If I started offering a service to car sellers where I came round, took some pictures of your car, drafted an advert then uploaded it onto Pistonheads and Autotrader for you in return for a few grand I'd imagine it wouldn't attract too many customers or offers of investment on Dragons Den.

Yet that's effectively all that an estate agent is doing for anyone is 2015, unless there is something I've overlooked. I think they still have a place but I thought by now they'd have a far smaller slice of the cake.

Regards,

Jeremy

[Mikie711]

Currently our house is advertised on ASPC and with our solicitor on their web site. They do not however subscribe to Rightmove/Prime Location etc so the only other advertising is in the local rag at £200 a fortnight. In Aberdeen at least ASPC is still by far the biggest web site for houses by far probably because they have developed the site and made it quite user friendly. When we were looking it amazed me how backward some of the solicitor property center sites were, I think Tayside was the worst. So far all our viewings bar one have come from ASPC but Aberdeen is currently a quite challenging market for sellers.
We move at the end of March regardless so hopefully will have an offer on the table by then but not looking to good at the moment as most of the people that have been to ours have to sell first and therefore will find themselves in the same position as ourselves.

[tut]

You need a Solicitor really for the buying and selling legalities to be safe, but I could have avoided the £5K commission fee and the upfront costs of £900 for photographs, brochures, selling board, etc, as £200 covered all that with HouseSimple, and that is where the sale came from.

tut

[Mikie711]

The thing is tut, solicitors will still charge a commission on the sale price even if you walk in with the buyer. We had this when we sold our flat, a mate bought it off us, never even advertised it. Walked into various solicitors and they all still quoted prices including commission on the sale price. Money for nothing really, and a nice fat cheque for handling the conveyancing.

[BigD]

The thing is tut, solicitors will still charge a commission on the sale price even if you walk in with the buyer. We had this when we sold our flat, a mate bought it off us, never even advertised it. Walked into various solicitors and they all still quoted prices including commission on the sale price. Money for nothing really, and a nice fat cheque for handling the conveyancing.

That certainly shouldn't have been the case Mike, I have sold privately before and I didn't have to pay for estate agent, marketing commission etc. The solicitors used to charge 1% and 1% for a sale and purchase so their fee was based on the selling and buying price but this is not to be confused with selling commission, this is just their fee for the legal work. This was a few years ago though and mostly I think they'll charge a fixed fee which these days is well below the 1% of days gone by. There are costs that are incurred such as registration dues that are based on the value of the property so this is generally why it costs more for a higher value property. The actual legal work should be pretty much the same though so their fee shouldn't change that much for the conveyancing. Although I'm sure there will be reasons for the fee to be higher on higher value transactions such as increased Professional Indemnity Insurance costs.

[David]

That's not totally true - we just sold a house a few month ago and, although the solicitor offered putting it on the GSPC list, he was also happy to just do the conveyancing. We found our own buyer and conveyancing cost around the £700 mark. But that was after a lesson learned from another family member who had agreed to sell via an agent. No buyers found by the agent, eventually, out of desperation to sell, they went looking for their own buyer and brokered their own deal, but were stung for the full 1.5% agent fee. A painful lesson. If you find your own buyer, make sure any contract with an agent is terminated before you progress with it.

[Mikie711]

David, that's true but to keep it in ASPC you need to be using a solicitor to sell your property so what I said stands true because even though they didn't find the buyer it's still a sale in their eyes.

BigD they still charge 1-1.5% commission on sale price over and above their legal fees, up here at least. We managed to get 15% discount through Ruth's work but that only applied to the legal fees for selling and buying. The commission rate stands although only on the selling thankfully the buying is fixed rate.

I am talking about our current sale and purchase incidentally, the flat sale was years ago and some things have changed but not to a great extent. I just find the commission based system grossly unfair as there would be the same amount of work involved selling a £100k house as there would be selling a £1m house. Why the fees would change is and always has been beyond me.

[Jeremy]

Mike,

I think you may be confusing employing a solicitor to carry out conveyancing work versus employing a solicitors practice to market, sell and conclude.

You can pay a solicitor £800 to do the conveyancing as Dave said, but you do not need to have them market the property for you as well. 2 entirely separate transactions. If you also instruct their practice to act as a selling agent then their estate agency staff will handle that side of it.

Take your point re the ASPC advertising, but if you advertise on the big portals yourself via an online agent and get your local solicitor to do the conveyancing, you do not pay your solicitor a percentage of anything it's a fixed fee.

Regards,

Jeremy

[Mikie711]

I understand that Jeremy but like I said the single biggest site in the NE is ASPC. There are currently 2100 houses on ASPC, there are 495 on Rightmove for the same area 60 of which are over £500k. So in Aberdeen and shire at least you really need to be on ASPC. The only way to get a listing on there is through you selling solicitor, estate agents don't have access unless they are also Solicitors. In other words the have the market cornered as far as Aberdeen is concerned.
Ironically, tut's buyer came from on of the web sites and not ASPC and the place we bought likewise wasn't on ASPC. But still you can't afford to ignore ASPC. This may not be true else where in the country but up here it is and unlikely to change anytime soon.

[Jeremy]

Mike,

Never disputed the merits of the ASPC. As I said at the start, I don't know the Aberdeen property market at all.

I was just clarifying that you do not pay a conveyancing solicitor a percentage of sale price for carrying out conveyancing work which is what you seemed to be implying. Or at least that's how I, and others, interpretated your comments.

Anyway the main point is, conveyancing solicitor in your corner, home report in hand, upload your own ad and conduct your own viewings is the future as far as I'm concerned. Estate agents add no value to the process.

Regards,

Jeremy

[tut]

If you have the time to try it first, go on with someone like http://www.housesimple.co.uk. who will put it on with virtually all of the Portals online for around £200, including photos and the whole deal, apart from the SALE, itself.

If you get a buyer as I did, then just employ a Solicitor to carry out the sale, as said above it will be for a fixed fee as is the buying of our new house, and you will not pay any commission. If that does not produce viewers, then you may decide to go the whole hog and hire a Solicitor for the whole deal who can put it on ASPC as well, of course that costs you a few £hundred, plus the standard commission of 1.5%, in our case £7.5K, which we got down to 1%. However ASPC does not allow any Solicitor to take on a customer who is advertising on line, you would have to close your account down. This is why I went with McEwans, they are an Estate Agent and thus not allowed to advertise with ASPC. However as Mike says, this is a disadvantage, as most people in our area look there first, as would outsiders if they googled on it. However we wanted ours to go global so had to take that chance.

So I say it is really a no brainer to go online first for virtually no cost, then conventional if that achieves no results. I used A&C first with not a single viewing, then decided to go with McEwans the same day that we got the viewing from HS that resulted in a sale. However if you take on a Solicitor, you are liable for their fees no matter where the sale comes from afterwards. I could have pulled out either from the 14 day rule or the fact that the offer came before they went live, but decided that as the money was not in the Bank from the buyer, I would see if they produced any more viewings.

I am also using them for the buying of the new house, and as they appreciated that they could have lost out, they gave me a good deal on both transactions.

tut

[Kelvin]

I'm in complete agreement on the uselessness of estate agents. Over the course of the last few months we've met 9 through viewing different properties. All bar one have been unable to answer even the simplest of questions about the property or the area. We were really interested in one house so emailed a bunch of questions to the EA prior to viewing it. It was a complex house in as much that it had a 2 acre garden, 5 acre arable field and the house was an old Victorian farmhouse connected to some converted barns, so a lot going on. It had been on sale for a long time so you'd think they would be keen to get it off their books. We had to arrange a second viewing just to meet the owners as the EA couldn't answer any of our questions nor had he sent the questions to the owners. They were hacked off with him as they had provided answers to most of the questions when they put the house on the market.

My hoose should be dead easy to sell for your average EA as it's a straightforward town house on an estate. After I let the EA show the first interested folk around I said I'd do the rest of the viewings as she was just hopeless and simply followed them around saying 'I don't know' every few minutes'. I can't fault their marketing (bunging it in Rightmove) as I've had 10 viewings in under two weeks and four offers but it's an easy few grand for not doing much.

We've also found a house, made an offer and it's constant chasing of the EA for updates. And it's not that he's playing a game with us to test our eagerness, he's just disorganised and hopeless at calling back. Our experience is so bad that Ginny reckons she could do a far better job so is half seriously thinking about opening an agency herself although the sooner it all moves online the better.

[Mikie711]

Mike,

Never disputed the merits of the ASPC. As I said at the start, I don't know the Aberdeen property market at all.

I was just clarifying that you do not pay a conveyancing solicitor a percentage of sale price for carrying out conveyancing work which is what you seemed to be implying. Or at least that's how I, and others, interpretated your comments.

Anyway the main point is, conveyancing solicitor in your corner, home report in hand, upload your own ad and conduct your own viewings is the future as far as I'm concerned. Estate agents add no value to the process.

Regards,

Jeremy

You would think in this day and age that someone would have started a national web site for owners rather than agents to upload their photo's and schedule to. If only for increased market exposure. Along the lines of rightmove but for Joe Bloggs rather than just through an estate agent. It appears that if you are with a solicitor then it's a solicitors property center or an estate agent and the likes of right move or Prime location why can't it be both. Opportunity for a web developer perhaps, couple of hundred quid has got to be worth it if the site gets good traffic.

[tut]

We have just put an offer in for the new house, and it looks as if Ivan my Solicitor is living up to his name, and we will get it for £45K under the asking price of £335K for the house and land.

tut