A HOMEOWNER from Rainham in east London will attempt to flog her home via Facebook, as a way of cutting the cost of sky-high estate agent fees.
Shanty Helim will become the first homeowner to sell their property with a viewing on Facebook Live hosted by herself, with offers made through the Facebook Messenger app.
During the live-stream, Shanty will provide a virtual tour of her three-bed, semi-detached home and viewers will be able to ask questions in the comment section on the stream.
Shanty hopes the process will be a good way to avoid paying high estate agent fees, and will be a more convenient method of selling her home.
She said: “Arranging a viewing over Facebook Live seemed to me the perfect way to allow potential purchasers to ask me questions, look around the house, and make an offer, in a much more convenient way.”
Traditional estate agent fees can cost upwards of £4,000, and sellers can cut costs with online agents which charge a flat fee of around £500, but you’ll get fewer services for your money.
Selling your home via social media isn’t illegal, as there is no law that states you “must” use an estate agent, says property expert Henry Pryor.
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Nevertheless, 95 per cent of sellers do use an agent, perhaps because “many people appreciate that the emotional element makes it all too easy to make a mistake when selling what for many is their biggest financial asset,” he said.
Shanty’s home, which is currently valued at between £470,000 and £475,000, has three bedrooms, one bathroom, a garden and a driveway. Two floors are spread over 1,351 square feet.
The house is being sold via live-stream at 2pm on Thursday June 22, via Housesimple, which is a an online estate agent that charges a fixed fee of £595 for house sales, which covers a valuation and management of the sale through to completion.
It claims that its average client is 40 per cent more likely to sell than with a high street estate agent.
But what’s to stop you selling your house without any agent at all?
While it’s completely legal to do so, Henry argues that “the selling process is complicated and there are no end of things that can go wrong, many outside your control.
“Most agents earn their fee for keeping an agreed sale together when 30 per cent on average typically fall apart.”
Of course, your audience on social media is going to be extremely small, so if you do decide to sell on your own through your own channel, you might want to buy ads to publicise the sale – remembering to not include any private details (house number etc.) in images or descriptions.
Plus, you’ll need to spend money on conveyancing, which is is the process of legally transferring home ownership from the seller to the buyer, and other legal fees.
If you don’t want to go it alone, but also don’t want to spend thousands on high street estate agent fees, online agents such as Tepilo and Housesimple, which are partnered with sites including Rightmove and Zoopla and charge a fixed fee, can be good alternatives.
Recent research by the Post Office revealed that the cost of moving house has gone up by around 25 per cent in the past 10 years.
While stamp duty fees come to an average £1,774, estate agents’ fees cost around £4,310, the data showed.
The average cost of moving house
– Stamp duty, £1,774
– Estate agents’ fees, £4,310
– Surveyors’ fees, £764
– Conveyancing costs, £1,558
– Removals charges, £1,065
In Scotland, stamp duty has been scrapped, so the equivalent tax was looked at there to calculate the UK average.
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