Selling your house privately

If you’re staring down the barrel of hefty estate agent fees and thinking that this is a cost you could do without, then read on. In this article, we’ll take a close look at exactly what your estate agent does to earn their corn, and whether you could do all of that yourself and save a fortune with a private sale.

Selling your house privately is becoming increasingly popular, but is it the best option for you? Invest a few minutes reading this piece, and we’ll help you decide whether it is worth investing in an estate agent. This complete guide gives you all the info you need to make an informed decision.

How much do estate agents charge to sell a house?

Estate agents’ charges are one of the biggest bugbears for anyone selling their home. Running at anywhere from 1% to 3% of the final sale price – with 20% VAT added on for good measure – estate agents’ fees can come in at many thousands of pounds. On a typical house sale, at £250,000, you could be charged anywhere between £3,000 and £9,000. And if your property is worth more, your estate agents’ fees could easily run into five figures – even though there is very little difference in the actual work involved.

It’s an eye-watering expense, especially if your budget is tight, and it can feel especially galling if your agent doesn’t appear to be doing all that much to sell your home. Some seem to just sit in their swanky high street offices, drinking coffee all day, with a posh company car parked outside, making the occasional phone call if you’re lucky. Others will send out the experienced big guns to get your business, only to hand your home over to some fresh faced kid to look after as soon as you’ve signed your contract.

The perception is that most estate agents these days do little more than listing your property on Rightmove and waiting for buyers to come to them. No wonder more and more people are looking to cut estate agents out of the picture all together and save themselves thousands of pounds by selling a house privately without an estate agent.

What do estate agents actually do for their money?

A good estate agent can be worth every penny for the experience they bring to the table and the sound advice that they can give you. Like a good accountant, a good agent should pretty much pay for themselves by getting you more for your property than you would otherwise have got. Unfortunately, not all estate agents fall into this category, and many do very little to earn such a lot.

A good estate agent will visit you to appraise your home and offer a free valuation. This should be based on their accurate understanding of the local market and recent house prices, giving you a realistic idea of what your home will actually sell for. Unfortunately, they are just as likely to tell you what you want to hear, giving you a generous valuation to win your business. They can do this with impunity because when you inevitably have to reduce the asking price later, you’ll already be tied into a contract with them.

Once you’ve agreed a sale price and signed their contract, your agent will arrange to have your home measured and photographed, and put together a description for use both online and in their high street agencies. Once again, you’ll often find that writing the description is left to the office junior and the descriptions are little more than a copy and paste job of house hunting cliches that bare no resemblance to where you live. Finally, your home will be listed online on the agent’s website and on the major portals like Rightmove.

A good agent will also have a database of home hunters registered with them, and they will either email or call these to let them know about your property to try to find a buyer. They will arrange viewings (and even conduct viewings for you if you prefer), and they will negotiate with potential buyers on your behalf. Once an offer has been accepted, a good agent will follow the sale through to completion, making sure nothing goes wrong along the way.

You’ll notice that we say that this is what a good estate agent does. Sadly, as we discussed above, not all estate agents are so dedicated, and many will sit back and let Rightmove do most of the heavy lifting while they rake in the fees.

Can you sell a house without an estate agent?

The simple answer is yes. There’s nothing that says you have to use an estate agent to sell your home. If you’re selling your home to a friend or family member, you certainly don’t need to pay an estate agent to handle the sale, and the same is true if you are selling your home to a cash house buying company.

Even if you’re selling on the open market, you can still handle almost everything, from photography to writing the listing, and save yourself a fortune in the process. However, the question you have to ask yourself is do you want to?

Take a step back from the nuts and bolts of the process, and you’ll see that an estate agent also absorbs a lot of the stress of your sale, stress that will be all yours if you decide to sell privately. So while you don’t need an estate agent to sell your home, you might still want to use one.

Sell a house privately with Rightmove and Zoopla

One thing that you can’t do when selling your house privately, is list on those all-important property portals. Most of the major property portals, like Rightmove and Zoopla, don’t deal directly with the general public, so you have to have an estate agent of some kind. That might feel like a bit of a closed shop, but that is just how it is.

There are some online property portals that don’t insist on you listing via an agent. However, if the team here at the Guru have to search around to find their names, you can be pretty sure most buyers won’t have heard of them either.

The online property portals hold all the cards, so they can set their own rules, and this is where the online estate agencies, such as Purplebricks, Yopa and Strike come in. Online estate agents can get your home listed on the property portals for you for significantly less than a high street estate agent. They also offer a range of other services to help you sell your home, such as for-sale boards, photography and property details.

You can expect to pay around £1000 for their services – for example Purple Bricks is £999. However, in the Guru’s experience, you should always check the small print to see exactly what you get for your money. Strike claim to offer a free service, but this is very basic. Add in things like photography and viewings and the price quickly climbs to roughly the same level.

By the time you’ve compiled your sales package with an online agent, paying piece by piece, you may find you’re not saving that much in return for all the things you’re losing by not using a high street agent, like being able to actually talk to a human being. You’ll also find that these fees are non-refundable if you change your mind or the sale falls through, whereas most estate agents work on a no sale, no fee basis.

Selling privately without Rightmove and Zoopla

Of course, you could simply bypass the property portals altogether. True, 90% of buyers look online, but that isn’t the only place they look. People have been buying and selling houses for centuries before the internet came along, and while Rightmove is a big player in the property market, it isn’t the only game in town.

Selling your property privately can be as easy as listing it on Facebook Marketplace or on Gumtree. Unless your surname is Kardashian, your social media probably won’t have the same reach as Rightmove, but remember, you only need to reach one buyer to sell your home. You could even go completely old school and place an advert on the local village noticeboard, or in the community newsletter, or you could give it a bit of Marvin Gaye and use the grapevine to let people know your home is for sale. If you’re not in a hurry to sell, these could all be well worth trying before you invest in an estate agent.

If you live on a main road or busy thoroughfare, you may be able to attract passing traffic by putting up your own for-sale board. However, this probably isn’t an option if you live in a quiet close at the back of an estate.

The benefits of selling your home privately

The biggest benefit of selling your house privately is obviously the cost saving. As we said earlier, selling with an estate agent can cost thousands of pounds, although you will usually get a complete sales package for this price.

If you’re someone who likes to be in control of things, then selling your house privately is a great way to keep yourself fully involved in the sale process. There is nothing worse than waiting for the latest update from your estate agent or struggling to get your calls or emails answered.

Selling your house privately puts you in control of everything, from photographs to viewings, from negotiations to pushing through the sale with the solicitors. If you enjoy this kind of project management, then selling your house privately could be the perfect solution for you. However, if you don’t have that kind of mindset, then the Guru guides you to think again.

The drawbacks of selling your house without an agent

The flip side of being in control of your sale, is that you are also responsible for everything. Just let that sink in for a moment and see how it sits with you. It will be down to you to find a photographer (please don’t even think of snapping your home on your iPhone!), to write a compelling description, to price your home accurately, to book in and conduct viewings and to negotiate with potential buyers.

If that sends your stomach into summersaults, that’s ok; not everyone is cut out for this kind of stress. What’s more, if you are also trying to hold down a full-time job, or raise a family, at the same time, then it could cost you more in terms of time and money than you end up saving.

If you feel confident with handling your own sale, you can easily book a local snapper to photograph your home. Chances are they already work for many of the local estate agents anyway. You can also arrange things like your Energy Performance Certificate independently, and as someone who lives there, there’s no one better placed to write a compelling description of your home, highlighting the benefits of your property and the local area.

For many people, the awkward part comes with the negotiations. We Brits just don’t like to talk about money. It makes us all turn Hugh Granty with embarrassment. What’s more, you also have the added worry that getting it wrong could cost you thousands of pounds, so you end up no better off. Estate agents are seasoned negotiators, but most of us mere mortals are pretty useless when it comes to wheeler dealing (and those that aren’t can come on so strong they frighten buyers off).

Selling your house to friends or family

You might think that selling a property to a friend or family member would be the easiest thing to do, with no estate agent needed, but this isn’t always the case. In fact, this kind of negotiation can be the hardest of all. It’s a fine line between not ripping off someone you care about, and not being taken advantage of because they expect some kind of ‘mates-rate’, and if parents or other friends get involved it can get very messy.

Here at the Guru, we’ve seen so many sales like this go sour for everyone involved. Getting a great deal is simply not worth it if it comes at the expense of your friendship or it starts a family feud. There’s a good reason why you should never do business with family or friends.

If you’re committed to selling your house privately to someone you know, the Guru strongly recommends that you use an independent third party to handle the negotiations. This will go a long way in avoiding any of that emotionally charged angst. If your sale is negotiated fairly, by an independent party, you can find a way to share the savings you make on estate agents’ fees and other expenses, so everyone wins, and you’re still speaking to each other come completion day.

Selling your house to a house buying company

If you are looking for a quick house sale, with no estate agency fees to pay, you could consider selling to a cash house buying company. They will buy any house, in any condition, saving you a fortune. You can read about the costs of selling a home in our article here. By using a cash buyer, there are no estate agents’ fees and often no legal fees either, saving you at least four or five thousand pounds.

With a cash sale, there are no expenses involved in fixing your home up or redecorating ahead of the sale, no months of waiting around while time-wasters and tyre-kickers pick holes in your home, and no risk of becoming part of the one in three sales that fall through at some point before completion. Of course, this comes at a cost, around 20% of the value of your home, which means that a fast house sale to a cash buyer isn’t right for everyone.

To find the best cash house buying companies, and see who the Guru recommends, click the button below.

Is a private house sale right for you?

Estate agents may be expensive, and often next to useless, but selling your house privately is still a big commitment. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the kind of person you are, and the kind of house you have to sell.

If you are comfortable taking control, and full responsibility, for the sale, and your home is a popular style in a sought-after area, then there is nothing to stop you saving a fortune by selling your house privately.

However, there are good reasons why most people still use a traditional high street estate agent, in order to get a complete sales package from listing to completion. If you shop around, do your due diligence and ask friends and family for recommendations, you should be able to find a good estate agent who is worth their money, despite how much they charge.

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FAQs

How long does it take to sell your house privately?

The phrase, how long is a piece of string springs to mind here. If you are selling to someone you know then the sale should happen relatively quickly since there is no time spent marketing the property, carrying out viewings and waiting for a buyer to make you an offer, provided that the conveyancing process goes smoothly. One thing to bare in mind is that an estate agent will usually qualify a buyer to make sure that they can actually move forward with the purchase, if you are selling to a friend or family member you are probably not carrying out such checks so there could be extra time spent if the buyer needs to secure a mortgage if they don’t already have a decision in principle.

The quickest way to sell you house privately is using a house buying or ‘quick sale’ company, generally if there are no issues with the property then you can expect a sale to a company to take around 3 – 4 weeks.

Is it legal to privately sell your house?

Yes. There is currently no law stating that you need to use an agent to sell your house.

What are solicitors fees to sell your house privately?

Solicitor fees when selling your house privately will be the same as if you were selling through an estate agent. The exact fees will vary depending on the circumstances, if it is a leasehold property for example the fees are likely to be more. Generally conveyancing fees for selling a house will be around £500 – £1000 plus VAT.

If you are selling to a reputable house buying company they will cover all of your legal costs so you have nothing to pay.

Cash House Buyer Guru