Fred

Aug 17, 2016

Sell My Home - Game Changer

When I came to sell my property - a 2 bedroom flat in Battersea, London - it was only two and a half years since I had purchased it and I still had memories of being driven to distraction by the estate agent who showed me round. The splurge of hyperbole coming out of his gob was so outlandish that I would have been forgiven for thinking I was about to purchase Buckingham Palace. It was with this in mind that I was first drawn to online estate agents and particularly Sell My Home, who, from what I read during my research, are by a long way the leading online estate agent in the London market with the best knowledge of the intricacies specific to it. Their business model is simple: in this day and age, with the progression of the internet, everybody's primary tool when it comes to house hunting are online search engines. At the click of a button, you can see every property on the market within a 100 mile radius of your chosen area if you so choose. The market is a million times more transparent than it was 10 years ago - we can compare prices, square footage, area, outdoor space, proximity to transport and so forth and so on and everybody but everybody knows to within a few thousand pounds what their property in nominally worth - especially in London where the turnover of properties is enormous. So why pay a traditional estate agent 1-2% of the value of your property when you can do 99% of their job yourself. Online estate agents such as Sell My Home charge a very small flat fee to gain you access to all the online property portals and all you have to do in return is conduct your own viewings. With the estate agent who had sold me my home fresh in my memory, so it was I signed up with Sell my Home to sell my property. Some might consider doing your own viewings a hassle but when you consider the amount of money you are saving - you are essentially working for £1000/hr or more depending on the value of your property. And best of all, your buyers will not be driven to despair by some pimply faced pre-pubescent unqualified idiot in an ill fitting suit declaring that your "kitchen sells itself" or that your small box room "oozes period charm". The truth is a nice house does sell itself and instead of wasting your breath telling potential buyers about it, you can equip them with all the important information that a traditional estate agent rarely knows such as when the boiler was installed, what the neighbours are like, how much monthly utility bills are and just generally give them an idea of what it is like to actually live there. My own major concern with online estate agents was that there would not be anyone helpful at the end of the line/answering emails who would be able to give me advice along the way. With Sell My Home, that could not have been further from the truth. Behind what is a very sleek website which provides an incredibly easy online account from which you arrange all your viewings and see any offers you receive as they come in, there is a highly qualified, incredibly personable and helpful sales team and every client is assigned their very own personal account manager. My own was called Harry and he was contactable 24 hrs a day 7 days a week. He was helpful at every step of the process, offering advice on setting the price, helping me to organise viewings and suggesting ways to making them easier to manage such as holding open days etc etc. He negotiated the sales price for us and once we were under offer dealt with all the solicitors, other estate agents and surveyors so that I didn't have to. In short, he made the entire process from start to finish as easy as it could possibly have been and ultimately was the reason it was such a success. And if you are wondering about results. From going online, we received multiple viewing requests in the first week and had two offers within 7 days of being on the market, one of which was at the price that we needed. The buyers were far from easy - nervous first time buyers with a truly incompetent lawyer and Brexit happened a week after we accepted their offer but somehow Harry kept them on board and we exchanged a couple of days ago and are now looking to complete in early September less than 3 months after the property first went live. And that isn't even the best bit - as a result of using Sell My Home, whom I think did a better job than a traditional estate agent would have done anyway, I have saved myself close to £12,000. Without that saving, I wouldn't have been able to afford to purchase the house that I eventually chose. So fingers crossed we complete now and I am sure with Sell My Home in my corner - exchange to completion will be as stress-free as possible. If you need any more persuading to go online and specifically with Sell My Home next time you are selling a property, then look no further than the "traditional" estate agents who marketed the house that I have just exchanged contracts on. Their salesman told me the house had two garages when I first looked round it - however, it turned out that they were both attached to the house next door and the one I was looking at in fact had none! The vendors must have been paying close to £20,000 for that extraordinarily poor level of service. So the mantra that you pay peanuts and get monkeys is not always true. Some monkeys come at a price far higher than a couple of peanuts. However, with Sell My Home, you do pay peanuts but what you get in return is a very inventive online platform behind which sits a slick, professional, highly qualified sales team which has identified a flaw in an old fashioned, outdated market and found a way to bring it into the 21st Century to the benefit of us all. Thank you Sell My Home.