What to look for when you want to sell your house

When you want to sell your house what do you look for? Ideally, you want an agent who will do just that, and in addition keep you informed of progress and hitches and make the whole process easy and pain free. From personal experience this is very difficult to achieve.

A good start is to do a check on GetAgent.co.uk as they give excellent statistics on agent performance. I had a property to sell on the East Coast and three agents told me it would sell quickly and for the price I had in mind. Given that feedback by all three I adopted for the cheapest fee which was £1800 cheaper than the most expensive. In hindsight, when you are selling a house for in excess of £200,000 that figure does not really matter and I should have gone for the agent that was top of the charts and top of the fee rankings too, in fact they ultimately sold the property for me several months after the process started.

One quick way to see how good an agent is, is to look at the how they market properties currently. I have attached to this post a few pictures that are genuinely being used to market properties today! They are a diverse bunch, but I feel they all reflect the fact that some agents take a picture of what is there. They give no thought to how it could look with either a tidy up, straightening out or in some cases, not to take the picture at all as it detracts from what may be a perfectly marketable property. When we view pictures, and we are looking for somewhere to move into, we are probably looking for an aspirational purchase and if confronted by some of these pictures, we would probably move onto the next one as they are so awful. I sometimes wonder if the online platforms demand a minimum number of pictures in order to move a property up the rankings, that may explain the quality of pictures on this page. If I saw an agent offering pictures of this nature then I would probably give them a wide berth, I would certainly challenge them on what they think is acceptable and how such dreadful pictures managed to reach the internet.

Other considerations are of course, floorplan, square footage of the house, location of local services, schools, shopping etc. Most agents provide these automatically, I am sure there is some software link that adds such important detail. A video tour is also a good idea and I have seen quite a few, in fact I have yet to see a bad one so all credit to the agents for doing a good job there. Presentation is key, see the video below, and a house that looks clean and tidy, cared for and easy on the eye will always sell quickly. Sadly, a smooth process is as aspirational as the ideal property and you may not get good value for your fee.

So, if you are looking to sell your house, and you think that your agent is not working for their fee then contact us and we will give you a fair price for a fast sale with the minimum of fuss.

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