Not everyone is a fan of Estate agents. For many years we’ve wondered whether online property portals like Tepilo from Sarah Beeny would start the disappearance of Estate agents. Basically the question do you need an Estate agent with Rightmove Zoopla and Tepilo adverts has been asked many a time.

So do you really save money by using an online estate agent? Some would prefer the security of using an Estate Agent they can see even though it may cost a few thousand pounds. Often because of the fear of the unknown.  All though we are talking about saving money, if an online agent doesn’t sell the property then you have nothing to save as they didn’t sell it in the first place!  Now that’s a false economy.

Today we present 7 reasons you need an estate agent with Rightmove, Zoopla or any other online presents

1. The fact that an online agent have already been paid almost deflates any motivation to see the property. As opposed to an Estate agent who is running at a loss until he gets a sale. I say a loss as he has already committed to an advert, and details to print, local property paper and so on. Will an online estate agent sell a property as well as a High Street estate agent. Where is the motivation to sell and achieve results once you’ve had your payment?  Small estate agents rather than a corporate ones are more likely to put every ounce of their energy into finding you a buyer quickly as they have far more at stake.
2. Local knowledge on property sales. Although Zoopla has some amazing property index and historical data, it has no human element and is often a long way of a realist price. I’m sure this will improve over time. A good estate agent will add value to the sale price. This is one of the reasons many still use high street Estate Agent.
3. Some buyers don’t really want to meet the vendors face to face. The Estate agent acting as an in between can help keep emotions in place. Homeowners can be very defensive about their homes even though they are selling them. So Estate agents can negotiate a happy medium to keep both buyer and seller at peace.

Are Estate Agents needed?

1. Estate Agents can use there experience to reassure potential buyers about the issues that a survey might bring up. Also   ct to any observations made at viewing stage. A vendor would not carry as much weight in the eyes of a buyer and they might be suspicious of any advice and information supplied.
2. The high street Estate Agent will have a network of contacts in the area and is better placed to know who is around looking for a property like yours. There are still many buyers that don’t use the online searches and will just register with Estate Agents in the area of interest. Clearly in more affluent markets buyers potentially would have registered with an agent they built a good relationship with and buy through them eventually. So the combination of Estate Agent with Rightmove should cover all basis.
3. Building trust with a client and establishing and maintaining integrity is essential. Many buyers still like to see the face of the Estate Agent they’re dealing with. The Agent has a duty of care to both vendor and buyer so many buyers prefer to work with certain agents they know and trust.
4. A duel business exist with many Estate Agents that isn’t so intuitive with an online agent. The point is Estate Agents that have both Lettings and Sales can often refer people from one side of the business to the other. If an Agent has a database of tenants it is highly likely they have a pool of potential buyers as well.

So having seen the value of Estate Agents we have to conclude that they still have a part to play.

Most online agents don’t cost very much (Tepilo is free!) then why not try both? Why not  have an Estate Agent with Rightmove. No need to flood the market with your property which can be off-putting to potential buyers but a balance of both might be the best way to go. Certainly  the combination of Estate Agent with Rightmove covers all basis.

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Will Uk house prices fall or rise in the coming year ? What will the 2012 house market bring ?
We take a look at what the experts are saying and look to see whether the housing gloom is about to lift.

While the average house prices in the UK will have actually risen by 1.3pc by the end of 2011, with inflation currently at 5pc, property values are falling in real terms.

Rightmove expect UK House Prices to drop

Predictions for 2012 UK house prices

The Telegraph predicts 2012 will not see a revivial. They report “Inflation and the eurozone debt crisis will have a negative effect on house prices next year.”

This is Money’s property expert Simon Lambert speaks of  Estate agents claiming of a stand-off between sellers and buyers. The sellers reluctant to cut prices and the buyers unwilling to pay over the odds. Home sellers must either have a desirable property to sell in an in-demand area or be willing to lower their expectations, if they want to get a sold sign up outside their house.

Rightmove report UK House prices will show uncertainty. 2012 will be just as challenging as they’ve been in 2011. Asking prices are expected to rise by a mere 2%. Inflation-adjusted house prices will continue to fall in 2012, or at best stand still.

Your Mortgage Decisions predict great variances in house price movement across the UK. With the  south and in particular London and the home counties faring considerably better than northern England, Wales and Scotland. It would not surprise me to see some gains as significant as 5% to 10% within a commutable distance to London, as has been the case this year for pockets of desirable housing served well by schools, transport links and good community facilities such as leisure and retail. Other areas are likely to see a more benign outlook with a neutral to 5 to 10% decline in the areas of highest unemployment.

Capital Economics expect prices to decline by 5% in both 2012 and 2013.
UK House prices often follow the USA trend the following year. so while the UK doesnt have any exciting changes, The United States are predicting a better change. Newspapers in New York predict a positive outlook. Wall Street expect the U.S. economy to keep growing, albeit at a sluggish 2% annual rate but fast enough to avoid a recession. In the CFA’s survey, only 12% of respondents said they expect the U.S. economy to contract in 2012.

Related posts:

1. House prices continue recovery
2. Halifax says house prices over 5 percent rise
3. UK house prices set to fall

Rightmove is already the UK’s largetst property listings website, but now things have become even better for the huge listing site.

A recent survey revealed that potential property buyers complained that often the properties viewed in the search results were often out of date. So a team of developers have now improved the quality of the results.

Rightmove now provides an improved property listing

Rightmove claim this new update will improve the data quality and involves the removal of out-dated sales and lettings properties using a range of new filters and detection controls. The data quality programme has been introduced following consultation with estate agents. The aim was to establish what would represent a fair period of time for certain properties to be left on the site.

Quality and accurate property listings

Rightmove comments regarding the property listings : “The data quality measures we have introduced emphasise Rightmove’s commitment to maintaining an accurate property search facility for home-hunters and a fair and highly effective advertising environment for our member agents.Given the frustration that inaccurate or misleading advertising causes for home-hunters, we felt it right to introduce measures which restrict the amount of stock left on the site when it’s no longer available. This activity is equally frustrating for the majority of Rightmove member agents who keep their advertised properties in order and up-to-date.”

Rightmove started the data quality programme in January with the removal of over 50,000 ‘for sale’ properties, which had been cross-referenced with the Land Registry to reveal they had already been sold. So its been quite a clean up on the listings.

The data quality measures were widened this week to target properties indicated as being unavailable for excessively long periods of time such as resale properties listed as ‘Sold Subject to Contract’ and lettings properties listed as ‘Let Agreed’. Over 80,000 properties will be removed under this new measure.

All Rightmove member agents have since been kept informed of each new data quality measures. The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

Update: It’s worth noting that this was a change in the property listings which is hidden data, not the actual presentation of the listings themselves, so little differences will be seen.

Related posts:

1. Property Listing Sites
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3. Property Top Trumps – RightMove

Don’t you just love Phil and Kirsty, and there back again for another new series.
Catch the new series of Location, Location, Location on Wednesdays at 8pm on Channel 4.

Phil and Kirsty, like a favourite Aunty and Uncle they almost row in front of the nation on the great show
Property experts Phil Spencer and Kirsty Allsop were asked for advice on beating the house price slump. They are famous for their down to earth approach and no nonsense understanding of the UK house market. Below are there Top 10 Tips for beating the house Price Crash.

Phil and Kirsty Top Location Location location Tips

Phil and Kirsty from Relocation Relocation

1. Take Your Time

The advice we’d give in this market is largely the same as we’d give in any market. If you’re selling your house, don’t rush into buying. Take your time, even rent for a few months while you look to make sure. Any purchase in this OR ANY market should be for the long term, so it’s important to get it right.

2. Sit Tight

Here is some good advice in a recession from Kirsty Allsop.
Don’t engage with the market if you don’t have to. Unless you HAVE to move house, sit tight and wait it out.

3. Get A Good Deal

Phil from Relocation Relocation suggest you haggle hard when buying – bear in mind the house may soon be worth less than you paid for it – the market always has troughs and peaks.

4. Make Money from a Room

Rent out a room in your house. If you are struggling to make repayments on your mortgage, consider taking in a lodger to lighten the load.

5. Get a Kerb Appeal

The biggest challenge as a seller is getting people through the door – pay close attention to the exterior of your property.

6. Be Realistic

Phil and Kirsty often speak of  being realistic. It’s all relative  – remember, when house prices fall, you may take a hit on your own sale, but you can make this up when buying as the drop hits the whole market.

7. Sort Your Mortgage –its Costing You

For most people, their mortgage is their biggest debt – and in a credit crunch you want to limit your debt as much as possible. If you’re on an interest only mortgage, lessen your chances of negative equity by changing to a repayment. Before you do anything, though, seek professional advice from an independent financial advisor.

8. Take Advantage Of Rate Cuts

If you are already on a repayment, consider if you can take advantage of recent interest rate cuts to pay a little bit more of the capital each month. The more you pay, the faster you run from negative equity – and the quicker you’ll own your home outright.

9. Look After Your Property

Even if it’s not with a new bathroom or kitchen – keeping paintwork fresh, boilers regularly serviced and gardens well maintained can work wonders. And it’s cheaper to fix little problems rather than wait until they’re big ones.

10. Look For Innovative Ways To Get A Good Deal

Kirsty Allsop suggests house swaps are a good way to beat the stale market conditions. And for many types of people, like first time buyers, key workers or those in social housing, there are government and commercial schemes to help you get on the property ladder.

UPDATE: It seems Phil and Kirsty are really on form in the latest series on Channel 4

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1. Revealed : The real Phil and Kirstie from location location.
2. How to negotiate like Phil and Kirstie
3. Location Location Location is back

Selling your house on the Rightmove web site is certainly a great way to be seen and find many more potential purchasers. But how do you get on there? Most good estate agents are experts in selling properties and will know that a web prescence is essential for capturing the market of people moving into the area. So the next question follows: how do you choose a reliable Estate agent in the UK market with a good Rightmove presence?

You won't see a RightMove estate agents in your road

As 25% of buyers found their property on the Rightmove web site, it is a priority to make sure your agent can advertise your home on Right move. You may find it is worth paying more to choose a proactive agent who will
ultimately achieve a better price for your property.

Before you commit yourself to one agent, take narrow down your estate agent list to approximately three finalists who you want to invite to do a valuation. Make sure you ask them how they will invest in marketing on behalf of the vendor and should, at the very least, take photos of your property. Also ask how long it takes to go live on Rightmove as it could take up to a week and yet shouldn’t take longer than a day or two after approval.

Rightmove enhanced advertising options

You may want to speak to your chosen agents about the Rightmove enhanced advertising options, Showcase and Premium Display to help sell your home even faster. You may need to negotiate with each agent to get the best commission rate though the lowest rate doesn’t always mean the best service.

Check out the estate agents profile describing their business. Does your estate agent belong to Ombudsman for Estate Agents or the National Association of Estate Agents. Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors is also acceptable.

Don’t forget if the estate agents don’t impress you, it’s unlikely they’ll impress your Right move.co.uk visitors.

Related posts:

1. Pre-election house prices up – Rightmove
2. Are Estate Agents needed
3. How to advertise on Rightmove

10 Downing Street  isn’t for sale, but if it was…

With Right Move, Tepilo, Zoopla, Up my street or Find a property, we are a nosey bunch in the UK. If we aren’t buying property, we love to know what Mrs Jones paid for hers down the road. Or what the neighbours house looks like on an estate agents site. 10 Downing Street, colloquially known in the United Kingdom as “Number 10″, is the headquarters of Her Majesty’s Government and the official residence and office of the First Lord of the Treasury, an office now invariably held by the Prime Minister.

Just imagine if 10 Downing Street was for sale

So what if  10 Downing Street was for sale? well we know its not that simple if you want to move into that address and it certainly isn’t based on price alone. Though imagine for a moment if it was a simple as an asking price…

Zoopla recently valued the residential portion of 10 Downing Street, worked out under which PM value was lost and gained, calculated the stamp duty payable in April 2011 (at 5%, that’s £225K) if it was for sale on the open market, and identified and worked out the value of other 10 Downing Streets around the UK.

Here are their reported results for 10 Downing Street:

• Gordon Brown currently worth a £4,574,831
• Tony Blair when he left was worth £5,037,251
• John Major £1,644,558
• Margaret Thatcher £1,804,952

Zoopla also reports that property prices have risen since the last election in 2005 in each of the party leaders’ constituencies

• by over 12% in David Cameron’s;
• by just over 5% in Nick Clegg’s
• by almost 19% in Gordon Brown’s

So there you have it, thanks to Zoopla we now know it’s not been the best property boom in recent times, which of course we knew already.

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1. Property Price Extremes
2. Property Listing Sites
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Is it possible to advertise on Rightmove for free ?

Many seeking to sell their homes online, want to advertise on Rightmove. Rightmove is the biggest property websites in the UK. Understandable as more than 90% of all UK estate agents list on Rightmove.

It appears that sadly individuals selling their homes directly cannot list their property on Rightmove without an estate agent.

Should it be free to advertise on Rightmove

This is due to Rightmove’s advertising policy. All properties advertised on their site should comply with the “Property Misdescription Act of 1991″. This Act was designed to protect the public from estate agents that stretched the truth about a property. It was devised to provide protection to the general public making it illegal to make false or misleading statements.

So are there any other ways that an estate agent can offer access through there registration with Rightmove? Any way to supervise the statements made and thereby approve the submissions for a minimal cost?

It’s worth noting there used to be a few estate agents that did comply with the act. For a small fee they enabled you to advertise on Rightmove.

Good news!.

Well I thought so, until I contacted The Little House Company online estate agency
In the past, they were are able to list your property on Rightmove for a small fee, until Rightmove decided to block the idea.

I decided to contact The Little House Company to find out what had changed since they couldn’t now directly advertise on Rightmove.

Nick Marr founder of The Little House Company told us, “We offer an online estate agents service that does not include listing on Rightmove anymore. We were working with a number of agents but Rightmove sent us a legal notice asking us to stop. They felt we were amounting to reselling their service. We now simply recommend or refer our clients to this panel if they want a Rightmove listing”.

Nick continues, “We offer a full online agents service apart from Rightmove. Despite us being registered estate agency in the eyes of the law and the fact we produce compliant listings Rightmove are uncomfortable with us on their website as we promote private sales. They receive complaints from estate agents and we will never be on that website whilst we offer consumer choice with our services”.

“One of my main competitors www.mypropertyforsale.com has given up private listings so that he can have his properties on Rightmove. If we did the same it would be yet another private sale business squeezed out of the industry”.

Will you be able to advertise on Rightmove in the future for free?

Maybe we will see things change in 2012. But currently Nick Marr told us “We contributed to an OFT report last year which concluded: The OFT’s study into home buying and selling FEB 2010 found that the housing market remains dominated by traditional estate agents with weak competition between them on price. As property prices rise during housing booms, so too do estate agents’ fees. Overall satisfaction with estate agents, however, has improved in recent years, according to research conducted as part of the study. Where there are problems with transactions, consumers generally do not think the estate agent was at fault. The OFT believes that innovation in this sector, in particular through online services, could have a dramatic impact on the cost of buying and selling a home”.

So there we have the reasons why you can’t advertise directly on Rightmove, but there does seem to be some good alternatives to consider.

We will review some of these alternatives over the coming weeks. What do you think? Should you be able to directly advertise on Rightmove  web site?

Related posts:

1. How to sell your house on Rightmove
2. Rightmove estate agents
3. Property Top Trumps – RightMove

The largest drop for 4 years has been reported this week. The asking price of homes being put up for sale has fallen by 3.1% in the past month, according to the property website Rightmove.

As a result of the economic uncertainty and concerns about the state of the eurozone, asking prices are reflecting a dramatic fall. The worst fall since December 2007. It could be due to would- be sellers postponing their marketing until the new year. The weekly supply of homes put on the market is now at the lowest since the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008.

All 10 regions in England and Wales tracked by Rightmove showed falling asking prices in November, the first time in more than three years they have all declined together. Shipside said that it’s “no great surprise” that property owners looking for a sale “have had to accept a substantial haircut on their asking prices.” Nationally, values were up 1.2 percent from a year earlier in November.

It does provide a positive spin for those looking to pickup a property bargain.

Related posts:

1. Rightmove expect UK House Prices to drop
2. Sellers drop asking prices
3. Rightmove Record Year

Rightmove reports that with only 98 days left until Christmas, now is the time to put your property on the market to be sold before Christmas. We are all familiar with the propert slow down every year leading up to christmas, so there really is very little time left to start marketing, especially with changes coming in March 2012 stamp duty relief.

Rightmove director Miles Shipside, along with other property portals, building societies and banks also remember this month is 3 years on since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which triggered the freeze in credit markets and wholesale mortgage funding, additionally there is the ending of first-time buyer stamp duty relief on the 25th of March 2012. The nil-rate threshold will fall from £250,000 to £125,000, so first-time buyers should be aware that they must have completed their purchase by that date to avoid paying stamp duty of 1% of their purchase price.

Rightmove reports that with only 98 days left until Christmas - Market Now

The director of Rightmove referes to the need to remember the Stamp Duty relief will soon be over and says: “Many buyers hope to move in before the Christmas break and enjoy their turkey in their new abode. With less than 100 days left before Christmas there’s an opportunity for some deadline-focused movers to do their bit to get some action into a market that is still pretty moribund three years after the financial fiascos that precipitated the downturn. It’s a delicate balance between the markets not being flooded with sellers desperate to sell and having enough of them to bring prices down to more affordable levels and encourage more buyer activity.”

He also mentioned the relative shortage of property coming to market continues to help underpin prices, with the average unsold stock per estate agency branch only slightly up from three years ago, at 78 properties.

So with these current market conditions and the 94 day average time a property is on the market, sellers seeking to tie up a deal in the 98 days left before Christmas need to take action now to undercut and out-promote their competition and get their property sold.

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1. Rightmove : Broken housing market
2. Rightmove hit as Google enters UK housing market
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Rightmove.co.uk blog claims its best to sell property with the nose in mind. It’s been a long known fact that if you walk into a property holding your nose for the wrong reasons, its going to have a negative effect no matter how amazing the property is. So is there any truth in the psychology of letting the coffee brew in the background on each viewing, or start baking your loaf of bread or cakes for the kids.

It’s true to say that as we discussed a few days back that the first 11 seconds makes or brakes a property viewing, then it make sense that smell has a heavy impact on you within those 11 seconds, in effect it provides a homely atmosphere especially if associated with pleasant smells of childhood like cakes.

Rightmove.co.uk claim - bread and coffee smells - help sell property

Flowers are an interesting smell as they can work both ways, fresh and smelling good -great, but some flowers can smell awful or look droopy and work the wrong way so they make both lists. Fresh flowers in the entrance hall can make a real difference to a buyers first impression of your house.

So what are the attractive smells that can make a positive impression on your viewings, and what are the unattractive smells

Rightmove.co.uk list of positive smells

• Baked bread
• Fresh flowers
• Crisp clean sheets
• Cake in the oven
• Fresh coffee brewing
• Vanilla
• Lemon
• Lavender
• Chocolate
• Roast dinner

Rightmove.co.uk smells to avoid

• Cats and dogs - believe me if your not a pet owner it is there!
• Any tobacco smells
• Cheap air fresheners
• Spilling dirty bins
• Damp washing on a radiator

Why does coffee fill the house with its smell?

That amazing aroma of brewing coffee moves rather quickly once its on the brew. The volatile oils in the coffee bean has been one of it singular major attractants. Scientists say it is only a small group of components that are responsible for the aromas but it is their high level of concentration that makes it so distinct. Steam from the brewing process help distribute the aroma in the relative confines of your property.

I see bacon isn’t on the list of smells that sell, would you have the smell of bacon, or do you have another smell you use when selling your property?

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