The eBay way to sell your home

Published 25th Aug 2007

Elizabeth Shaw and Jim Gayes may not know it but they are property pioneers. Not for them the old-fashioned route of instructing an estate agent and paying 2 per cent commission for the sale of their homes. They aren't even using low-cost internet estate agency sites. Instead, they are doing it all themselves, using the eBay auction site and the "social networking" site, YouTube.

It is for auctioning junk and memorabilia that eBay is best known. But between adverts for a Goblin Teasmade ("unused, reserve price £10.50p") and a £300 Grand Prix ticket signed by Lewis Hamilton ("I personally obtained this - photo proof"), you find an occasional home such as Elizabeth's four-bedroom, detached house in rural Lincolnshire, advertised for a £325,000.

"We want a private sale without an agent. There have been 750 hits on the site in five days and 10 have set up alerts to let them know the bidding on the house," says Elizabeth.
There is a sliding-scale fee for sellers, according to the reserve price of the item on sale - Elizabeth is paying £37 for her home's display - and sellers file an advertisement, written description and photographs.

There is a 10-day period for would-be buyers to contact the seller by email for more details or to arrange a visit, and then to place a bid. If a deal is done, payment is made through a third-party system that checks buyers' ability to pay.

Jim Gayes, a selfemployed businessman from Chester, has chosen YouTube to market his three-bedroom holiday home at Rhayader in Powys, Wales. The fiveminute video, with accompanying music and captions, features each room and gives extensive external views of the property, which Jim is selling for £250,000.

"YouTube is completely free once you create the video. My neighbour was in the pub and a lad walked up to him and said the house next door was for sale - he'd seen the video on the website, so it works," says Jim.

YouTube is dominated by teenagers, aspiring musicians and old TV clips, but feed "home sales" into the search engine and you will find dozens of houses and flats on video, most made by owners seeking to avoid estate agents' commission.
But some property professionals are now getting in on the act. Central London estate agency James Pendleton has several videos on its website and Hamptons International is also experimenting with them

"A video, whether on YouTube or an agent's website, or downloadable by prospective buyers on to their iPod, is a fantastic marketing tool," says Charlie Wright, of BPM, a property marketing firm.

"Over the next few months we'll be putting videos promoting up to 1,000 homes a month on YouTube. Gradually, a culture will evolve. People will see the site as a shopfront."
Landgate, a London estate agency selling only new-build homes, makes its own videos - in the form of podcasts - and emails them to prospective buyers to download or play through their desktop or laptop computers.

"We don't use models of the development and we don't have a front office. Instead, we show buyers our videos," says Landgate's Peter Davis, a former estate agent with Foxtons and Savills who has recruited Dominic Littlewood - presenter of BBC1 daytime property show To Buy or Not to Buy? - to narrate his firm's podcasts.

It's not surprising, perhaps, that what the British are doing now, Americans did last year. Diane Cohn, an estate agent in Reno, Nevada, started putting her own property videos on YouTube in summer, 2006. "For homes over $1 million, I engage a professional videoproduction company to produce a minidocumentary," she says.

‘For homes less than a million, I use a Sony digital video camera, an Apple Mac [plus software packages], iMovie and Soundtrack, then upload to YouTube. It takes time to edit, but it's insanely easy. I've had buyers contact me who saw the videos."

While British estate agents may now be looking at these internet platforms, homes, the establishment organisations at the head of the property industry frown upon the likes of eBay and YouTube being used directly by sellers.

"You still need to commission an estate agent," insists a spokeswoman for the National Association of Estate Agents. "You Tube and eBay don't have a specific audience but an agent will have a list of people wanting to buy a specific property in a specific location.

"Agents will handle all advertising, viewings and negotiations over price and any tricky questions about the condition of the home. It's likely that the seller will get a better price through an agent than handling it themselves - enough to cover the agent's fee."

But people such as Elizabeth Show and Jim Gayes are not deterred. They used estate agents to value the properties but then prepared their own written details and have shown around prospective buyers who spotted their homes online.
"I accept I may need to use an agent. Maybe it's not easy for us Britons to talk about money and problems face to face, which is why so many hire agents," says Jim. "But while there's a chance of saving £4,500, I'll give it a go."

Source: ' Telegraph Online '

View All Latest Articles