Place of design

We are selling up and moving to bigger premises. The quote for the estate agents was £4700. They let us know that more than 70% of the enquiries they get originate from online sources. Find out how we are saving £1000’s

Address for the site: www.burtonjoycehome.co.uk

The cost of moving
Estate agents locally are charging between 1 and 2% of the value of a house. That’s a lot of cash, for really not doing very much. They measure up, take some dark rubbish photography, do a poor write-up, and slap you on a popular house portal website and wait. If you don’t believe us, go and look at more than 10 houses on any of the housing portals, and you can see what we mean

As you will probably know – the most popular house sale website in the UK is a run by a cartel of estate agents, who basically don’t allow private sales. Apparently we just can not be trusted to purvey the property information accurately. Having seen some of the descriptions that estate agents manage to write, we think somewhat this is a pot calling the ‘shiny’ kettle black situation!

There is however a way around this – some estate agents will market your house for you for a low fixed fee. By providing such an estate agent with a write-up, photography, and producing a more than decent website, we managed to negotiate the fee down considerably to a few hundred pounds. Google “internet estate agents”

What we did
We produced a super website, with fantastic photography (we are professional photographers). We made sure the website was optimised for search engines by design. We promoted the site carefully – locally and on Google. We had 500 leaflets printed for £35.00 and then had the leaflets delivered locally. We brought some signs that we designed ourselves from a printing company advertising on a popular online auction site

The content of the website and the leaflets, and the photography revolves around honestly presenting the property. We can see no point in someone driving for hours to see the property, in order to find out it isn’t what they wanted. This approach is paying off. Preparing for a viewing takes time and effort, and we definitely don’t want pointless viewings

Presentation
We are looking for houses, and we are appalled by the poor photography for houses on estate agents brochures. Remembering they are charging £1000’s to the vendors of these properties – what exactly are they spending the money on?

A professional photographer session in your home will be £300 upwards depending on the size of the house, but then the estate agents fees increase on a larger house. We are providing downloadable brochure, high resolution image packs, and HIP pack etc. The point being that we don’t want to show people around the house who don’t want the house. By actually being honest about the property, all of our viewings have been spot on

Results

The site did the job THE HOUSE IS SOLD STC! and within a few months too!!!! we are calling that a A1 result

Costs
Website: We did this in-house. A similar website would be in the order of £500
Photography: We did this in-house, similar photography would be in the order of £300
Leaflets: designed in-house, design costs – unsure – but printing was £35.00
Delivery of leaflets – local paper shop – £15.00
For sale boards – we designed these in house, available for 6.99 each + 6.99 postage from a seller on a popular auction site

Assuming a sale – (we will keep you posted); we have spent a grand total of:

£245.00 – one of payment to internet estate agent in order to get our house listed online on the most popular auction site
£35.00 – leaflet printing
£15.00 – leaflet delivery
£20.97 – for sale boards
£50.00 – for a premium home.co.uk listing
5.99 – for a .co.uk domain name
£371.96 – grand total

This represents a saving of £4328.04 on the amount the estate agents wanted to charge us!

Even if we paid a photographer £300.00, and a web designer £500.00 we would be saving £3528.04

What else can you do?
There are plenty of private sales sites – home.uk being the best, which has generated us 1 viewing

Advice
Take a step back, and understand what your estate agent actually does for you. They will argue they contact customers and drum up business. In fact 70% of what they do, we did for ourselves, but to a much higher standard

That means that in our case we would be paying £4328.04 for that 30% we are missing out on. In fact, estate agents who have sent us details to “our brief” have bee way off. Our brief is “Rural, isolated, period or character + space for the business” what has been coming through the door in the post is “estate, small, modern” In essence that 30% isn’t looking that rosy after all

We are not suggesting all traditional office based estate agents offer poor service, it is that so far we are struggling to find one that offers a good service at a reasonable price

Do you want to do what we did?

Sure – contact us. We will happily photograph and produce a website for your house. You will need to provide a good high quality write-up

We can provide you contacts for the boards, and HIP packs, we will provide you contacts for the online estate agents. If you want a leaflet designing, or the board designing, we can do that for small fee. We can provide you contacts for printing etc. We will do the initial Google promotion, and SEO, and give you guidance on how to promote the site locally

We are based in Nottingham, and do travel, however if you are too far away, we can find a local photographer to do the shoot for you (We have a network of very good professional photographers to call on)

For an average sized house, we will charge £500 for the website and £300 for the photography. Large houses will be proportionate to the amount of extra work involved (not the amount the house is worth)

Want to find out more, just contact us

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