Green Investing Today

All the buyer exposure in the world will not make an overpriced property saleable. Ensuring that your home is advertised in all the best places is crucial. These days if you’re not advertised on the major property portals then you may as well not be advertised at all. Local newspapers are for jumble sales and visiting prostitutes. Estate agents windows are simply for the nonchalant glance and the vandal’s brick. Everyone knows that if you’re not on Rightmove, Zoopla, FindaProperty and Prime Location you just won’t sell. But that doesn’t mean that if you are on them all that they somehow become the magic bullet to finding a buyer under any circumstances either.

Take a step or two back to get an overall picture of today’s market. Are lenders lending? Not really. Are buyers buying? Doesn’t look much like it. And what about sellers? Are they selling – or have they given up and taken their homes back off the market? Sometimes it certainly looks that way. Pick an estate agent – any estate agent. Now get them to value your home. Repeat the process a few times, and compare all those valuations. They’ll all be different, and all probably slightly higher than you expected. Now, why would that be? Three reasons: one being the agent’s greed glands working overtime when it comes to his percentage-based fee; two being the agent wants to get your greed glands working as well as his … and the third being that nobody really wants to hear that they’ve actually lost money on their home. And it’s happening all over the country – in fact, WHICH? Magazine has recently been giving High Street estate agencies a great deal of grief for doing just that.

Despite there being around a million and an half properties listed on Rightmove, house sales are currently at an all-time low. If you look hard enough, you’ll find a mortgage lender or two out there who are actually prepared to lend money. And if you look even harder, you will find buyers. Eventually. This is because over the past few years, housebuyers have become much more informed about their local property market. They now research harder than ever before, using the Land Registry website and all the other online information sources to work out how much a property should be selling for. And if your house is listed at a higher price than comparable properties in the area, potential buyers aren’t even going to bother clicking on the details because they’re too busy looking at more realistically-priced homes. It’s nothing personal – just human nature. After all, would you start your search at the most expensive home on the market and work your way down the price range? Or would you start at the least expensive and work your way up?

There are only two reasons you house won’t sell. The first, of course, is a bad estate agent. Or, more accurately, one with no advertising exposure to speak of, either because of its size or because it’s cutting back on overheads. The second reason has nothing to do with the agent – it’s just that the property’s asking price makes buyers scratch it off their list automatically. So if you’re having a hard time selling, then yes, your agent could well be the reason. If they’re not shouting to the world that you’ve got the perfect property for someone out there – like online estate agents do – then by all means dump them. But if they are spreading the word about your property the way they should be, then it’s time to take a deep breath and adjust your asking price.

Because the best and most expensive advertising will still not convince people to pay above market value. Indeed projecting a picture of your house on to David Beckham’s butt cheeks will not sell it if overpriced compared to others.

Home buyers wont to traipse into estate agency offices now. 90% of them search for property on the internet. eMoov cover the whole of the UK but save money by not having lots of properties which you will end up paying for in high estate agents fees. eMoov are online estate agents. They are a step up from private house sales and ten times cheaper than the High Street. Why pay more?