Estate Agents

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Squidward

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I'm having an estate agent come and look at my property to put a price on it. They are quoting .85% of selling price + vat + advertising expenses (does this sound resonable??).

If I go with this particular agent, and later on decide to take the house off the market, am I liable for a fee? I understand I'd have to pay the advertising expenses, but is there an other charges they could hit me with??
 
Sounds good. They'll usually value the house for free. I was quoted a sale fee of 1% a month ago incl listing on myhome.ie plus vat plus advertising if required. If you back out later they'll probably include their time input plus expences as a fee against you so think hard first about what you're at. Try to get them to include myhome.ie listing in the 0.85%.
 
Cheers Redzer. Might try and sweetalk them into including advertising on myhome although, I doubt it will work....!
 
My family are auctioneers. 0.85% is an excellent quote. It used to be 2 - 2.5% 10 years ago when I used to help out. The value of the house can make a difference as obviously they can reduce their fees if the house is worth quite a bit. Just make sure you choose the right auctioneer though. People are swayed by price for too many things. It's quality of service you're looking for. Remember, you're relying on these people to impress everyone that walks through your door. I have looked at a number of houses down through the years to buy and if I don't like the auctioneer that's selling a house, I've often passed the house by.
 

Why not put it up for sale yourself on www.fsbo.ie
 
Hi Squidward,

Recently had our home evaluated by 3 agents. Their quoted charges ranged between 1% to 1.5% + vat + adv. So, 0.85% is quite good. The highest estimated value on our home came from the agent with the highest fee.

Watch out for the adv. charges, though as they can escalate if you don't keep an eye on them. Where do they advertise, for how long and at what cost ?
 
Hi Redser,

They said that they would put it up on daft.ie which is free, but we're going to charge me 200 euro for posting it on myhome.ie. The agent was due to come to the house today, but i have decided to hold off at the moment as there are not many houses for sale in the particular area I want to move to.
 
Quick question on this topic:
Is it easy to cut out the estate agent and auctioneer and advertise and sell yourself ?
 
Hi aocon, have a look at the website foxylady has mentioned in her post on this topic.
 
Aocon - it depends on whether there is a demand for property where you are living. We recently advertised and sold ourselves - it cost us less than €100 for newspaper ad from which we got our buyer. We also got a good response to free ad placed in local Superquinn. It's definitely worth a try before you fork out thousands to estate agents. No one knows your property better than you.
 
I've just gone sale agreed via an estate agent and I'm glad I went that route despite the cost for the following reasons:

1) They valued the house higher than I would've and got the asking price. Now I know that you could just get the free valuations and chance your arm on your own but the good estate agents should have the up to the minute knowledge of the market to convince buyers of the price and benefits of your property compared to others. You'd be working in a vacuum on your own.

2) They showed it to 20 sets of people and 4 sets of second viewers in several viewings and I found it hard enough to get out of the house for all of that let alone find that many viewers and co-ordinate it from scratch.
I don't doubt that you can sell on your own but on average do you save money, have more hassle than its worth or lose out on maximising the price you get by going on your own? Who knows really. Its a personal judgement call based on your own situation. If the prices are stable, you have the time and energy and money is tight then selling on your own may be a good option otherwise the estate agent looks the better option i.m.h.o.
 
I think Redzer's point about being glad he went the route he did is important. People make their own choices for their own reasons.
From our point of view - we chose to go the direct route because we felt we had nothing to lose. We don't like dealing with estate agents [previous experience] - please note I'm not intending to start another debate here! A couple of people we knew had sold houses/apartments successfully themselves, and it was how our parents always sold their houses. The initial outlay was so minimal that even if it didn't work we weren't going to be hurting.
We achieved €7k more than our neighbours who had sold a couple of weeks prior to us .... using an agent. If you take the fees they paid into the equation - the gap increased even further. Myhome.ie also gave us a good indication of going rate.
The response to newspaper ad was very good. We had 3 viewings - all block - because we thought it was good for people to see that there were others interested. As we were showing ourselves - we were able to control timings etc and dealing with the interested parties directly - which we felt was a bonus.
To answer the questions posed. Did we save money? Without a doubt. Have more hassle than it's worth? No. Lose out on maximising the price? In our opinion - definitely not.
So it's horses for courses - like Redzer - we are very glad we went the route that we did.
 
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