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There are a few options avalible to you when selling your home, however each have advantages and disadvantages...

How to sell your house privately?

Selling your house privately is a great way to save money on agency fees. There is nothing stopping you erecting your own for sale board or taking an advertisement in the local newspaper. But the best way is by listing your property online, as this is where the vast majority of potential buyers look for properties.

Sites such as houseladder.co.uk and gumtree.com as well as others give you the opportunity to market your property online. However these sites suffer from a lack of visitors; properties get approximately 50 - 200 views at best compared to rightmove.co.uk (one of the main property portals that only agents have access to) where houses get around 2000 views within the first week. By selling your house privately you don't pay agency fees but you dramatically lose the potential for finding the right buyer for your property.

So Why use a traditional estate agent?

A traditional High Street estate agency will typically charge around 1.5% plus VAT or even up to 2.5%! On a property worth £350,000 with a fee of 1.5% +VAT that would equate to a cost of £6300.

Although this seems a huge amount of money, estate agents will not consider this unreasonable when they add up all their overheads. The fee you pay will be used to fund expensive premises, rates, heat, light, insurances, newspaper advertising, staff costs, portal memberships, telephone bills etc. It is not uncommon for a High Street agent to have monthly costs in excess of £40,000!The fee you pay is a direct reflection of the high costs involved in running an estate agency.

On the plus side if you pick the right agent you will benefit from local knowledge and expertise, accompanied viewings where necessary and most importantly have access to major property portals e.g. Rightmove. There will be tried and test systems in place to automate the whole sales process which should mean that each stage of the process is carefully managed to a smooth conclusion. In summary an agent can be worth every penny providing everything goes to plan and they keep their promises.

Is there a better way?

By selling your home privately you don't pay a high fee to an estate agent, but you don't have access to the main property websites like Rightmove which makes finding a buyer almost impossible. Using a traditional estate agent you maximize the exposure of you property to thousands of online buyers but you pay a very large sum for that service.

Having weighed up the two extremes of selling your home, you may wish to consider what we feel is an ideal compromise situation! When we launched New Move Our aim was to create a unique operating system that would radically reduce our overheads, then our savings could ultimately be passed back to the client!

We believed that In order to have happy clients who would be delighted to recommend our services to their friends and family, we would have to offer the following;

• Excellent customer service
• Exposure on all the major portals (Rightmove, Zoopla, Findaproperty, PrimeLocation etc.)
• An unbeatable low fee from £999 + VAT
• No Risk - No Sale No Fee
• No lengthy contract
• First class in house conveyancing
• An energy performance certificate (EPC) service
• Free independent mortgage advice