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House Selling

House Selling Blog and Tips

Five years ago I wrote a blog on ‘buying my house'. Well the time has now come to sell the house and move on, so here is my blog on ‘selling my house'

20th July 2010 - I'm selling my house

I have decided to sell the house and rent for a while, I figure that it is easier to sell a place at a good price if you aren't tied into any awkward housing chain. I also have a feeling that that the housing market is going to plummet soon, but I've been thinking that for about 8 years now, so I wouldn't trust my judgement!

Anyway, back to selling the house, first off, I need an estate agent

27^th July 2010 - Getting an Estate Agent

I've interviewed two estate agents, one larger national company and a smaller local company. Both obviously talked about how great they were and neither of the estate agents were too annoying, also rather encouragingly they both gave very similar evaluations and seemed confident that the property could be sold quickly (well they would say that wouldn't they). The larger estate agent had a commission rate of 1.95% and would no budge from this, whilst the smaller estate agent offered 1.25%

However it turns out that when estate agents quote these fees they are EXCLUDING VAT. I practice which I think is pretty immoral, all home owners are consumers and it makes no sense to quote prices ex-VAT. I put this to the smaller estate agent and used it as a bargaining tool to reduce his prices to 1.25% including VAT, which is a rate of 1.06% ex VAT.  I may have been able to bargain this down even further, or perhaps get a better quote elsewhere, but the general consensus is that 0.9% is the absolute minimum that a high street estate agent will charge (although you can get cheaper deals online), and I do want my agent to have some incentive to sell the house. I took the deal with the smaller agent mainly due to the lower commision rate, but also because they come near the top if you google 'house buying in Cambridge'.

On that note we also have agreed a modification to the fees, basically if the house for 10% less than its target price then the commission will be reduced to 1.0%, and it if sells for 10% more than the asking price then the commission is increased to 1.5%. I felt that this gave the estate agent even more incentive to sell the house at the best price he could get.

31^st July 2010 - Making the House More Sellable

The weekend has all been about cleaning and tidying the house before the marketing photos are taken. We have tried some pretty standard tricks in order to make our small house more appealing and thus hopefully make it sell at a better price, or at least quicker. Most of these techniques are about making the house look bigger, roomier and generally newer than it really is:

• Generally tidy up of each room
• Clear out the junk from on top of the kitchen cabinets to make the room look less crowded and show off the fantastic kitchen that I installed
• Cleared out the junk on top of the bedroom wardrobe for the same reason
• Cleaned the walls and doors
• Removed the breadmaker, coffee machine, biscuit tin and the recycling bin from the kitchen to give more workspace
• Used left over paint from when we painted the house in order to touch up the walls and ceiling
• Scrubbed up the uPVC on the double glazing and conservatory to make it shine and how off how new it is (used some great uPVC polish for this)
• Hosed down the conservatory room to remove all the mud (where does that come from?) and debris from it
• Polished up the house number and front door brasswork to really make it shine
• Removed bits of furniture from the study to make it less cramped
• Bought a white grouting pen and touched up the kitchen tile grouting
• Cleaned all the windows
• Removed most of our personal photos so that potential house buyers didn't feel like they were intruding on someone else's home, and could imagine themselves in it.
• Replaced and added potted plants around the house
• Cleared off the dead ivy from the outside walls
• Trimmed the hedges and cut the lawn
• Added a couple of hanging baskets to the front of the house
• Drank a bottle of wine (this was when we finished)

 

Next step is to get the house photographed by the estate agent

 

8th August - House details go live

We agree an asking price with the estate agent based on their evaluations, and we decided to go for the higher end of their price estimates based on premise that we could always lower the asking price if we dont generate much interest.I did toy with the idea of setting the asking price so that the property would show up top in rightmove.co.uk if certain price filters were used, but decided that that was probably being too obsessive over the whole thing.

After having a few photographs (or perhaps 'lie-graphs' taken - lots of furniture was moved and I swear the lens made things look bigger), the proposed house details are given to me.

It required a few tweaks to the wording (I dont think the estate agent cares that much about the text) but otherwise was pretty good. I approved the details and sat back to wait for the potential buyers to show up.

 

15th August - House Buyers Visit

 

 After the first week we had had 4 or 5 people visit the house, with several showing a decent interest. However no offers at this early stage and no matter how interested people seemed whilst viewing the house, none came back for future visits.  It is early days, and i'll certainly be sitting tight for a few more weeks before doing anything drastic like changing the asking price

 

18th August - First Offer to buy

Our first offer to buy comes in! At a pretty reasonable 96% of the asking price! There are a couple of other people interested as well (including one fellow who wants to buy the house and all its contents to set up his son for University!), so I have decided to play it cool and drag it out for a little while longer to see what else comes along

 

20th August - Still only one offer on the table

I still only have the single offer for the house, although they have increased it ever so slightly. Obviously these offers don't last forever and at the moment I'm torn between accepting it, and waiting for a couple more people to decide whether they are interested in buying or not. After much discussion with the estate agent i decide to give it 2 more days as we still have a couple more people who are due to see the house

 

22nd August - The Estate Agent calls

The estate agent calls, and I assume that this means we are going to accept the offer, which is now at 97% of the asking price. I'm suprised however to find that another buyer has come in, at the asking price!  Before accepting this offer we decide to see if we can get a bidding war going between the two potential buyers, however after the estate agent makes a few calls its clear that the original people making the offer of 96% realy cant go any higher, and the second offer won't budge from the bid of the asking price.

I accept the offer!

 

23rd August - Meeting the buyer

With the price agreed for the house I wanted to meet the buyer (the estate agent had showed them around so I didn't meet them during their visits), not just out of curiousity, but also to see whether they were really serious about the purchase (dont forget its not legally binding until contracts have been exchanged), and to talk about the next steps that we would have to go through in order to make the sale as smooth as possible.

On meeting the buyer he certainly did seem serious, and came armed with a tape measure to check out some of the finer details of the house (to fit his furniture in), which I took as a positive sign. 

We discussed timescales, both of us wanted a quick sale (obviously), but we also agreed that we would set a target of completion (i.e. actually completing the sale) to take place one month after exchanging contracts (the point where the whole sale is legally binding). This would give me enough time to find a place to rent and would give the buyer enough time to give notice on his old place.

 We also discussed some of the white goods, which I agreed to sell at something along the lines of market value. This suited me as it meant I didn't have to worry about moving them out of the house and trying to sell them on ebay, assuming that the rental place I take comes with white goods.

 

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