Would you use an Estate Agent to sell your home who doesn't advertise on Rightmove?

I'm looking to move and currently can't deal with RM. I'm not getting anywhere - I ring the number, nobody answers. Or they take details and nobody returns the calls. On the other hand, I ring the agent directly and get the answers/viewings.

What do you mean? The number on the Rightmove ad is the estate agent isn't it? That's what's happened whenever I've called the number - it goes to the estate agent office.

I only look on RM so I wouldn’t choose an EA who didn’t use it because I’d be concerned that people like me wouldn’t know the house was for sale.

I'm so confused, are you phoning rightmove? you're supposed to phone the agent who published the ad..

No. Partly because it would limit potential buyers, but also because I probably wouldn't know the estate agent existed. We're selling at the moment and before putting it on the market we had a few agents round to get a valuation etc, and we picked those agents by looking at our area on Rightmove - what houses looked overpriced, what didn't have good pictures, was there a trend of X agent always having those houses we didn't think looked good or were overpriced? Were there agents where the pictures were good, the prices reasonable, the info good etc.

I think that if you believe someone in the village may be interested in buying it then go ahead with your local agent. If the agent is good they will have lots of contacts and know who is looking to move.

I agree re seeing a sign and then checking. A lovely house near our school recently had a For Sale sign and out of nosiness I went on to RM to look at it. It wasn't there and I had no memory of the agent's name so couldn't find it online at all. Admittedly my level of commitment to the search was lower than that of a buyer but if I HAD wanted to find it, I'd have had to go back to the house to look at the sign and been quite irritated immediately that the seller was forcing me to do that!

It's not just the convenience of Rightmove, but also the accessibility and the ease of viewing without any commitment.

In the old days, people would have to go to the EA (during their opening hours) and ask somebody for the printed particulars of any houses they were interested in.

Then, you would get all the questions about your own circumstances: are you ready to proceed; do you want us to market your house for you as well; let me add you to our mailing list; give me your number and we'll call you with every single any new houses on our books that may interest you; let me arrange an appointment for you to speak to our no-obligation mortgage adviser to see how much you could afford...........

It's the equivalent of people who own and run very small shops and who stand in the doorway, so you have to get them to move (and observe you) before you know if they actually have what you're looking for, how deserted and deathly quiet their shop is or how high their prices are. You end up feeling very committed and awkward, in a way that you never do with a standard supermarket.

Yes, with Rightmove, it means that you get a great deal of traffic from nosey people and those just wanting to fantasise about living in your ancient castle (so I've heard.....!) - but you also make it easier for casual viewers to see, and some of those may just stop to consider their realistic options and turn into serious potential buyers.

Also when we were looking for our house, we had a huge area we were looking in, I’d say a radius of 50+ miles. Basically an entire county, plus some areas just on the border in neighbouring counties. No way I would have been looking at individual estate agent social media or websites. There would have easily been like 100 of them.

And how would I even know what they were called or what to search for. I certainly didn’t want to have to sift through 40 social media posts to find the one 5 bedroom with at least 5 acres and outbuildings ripe for conversion that I was looking for. It was hard enough finding that on Rightmove.

Are your sales figures the same or better than other agents who do use Rightmove? There are absolutely agents who specialise in sort of off-market sales. Generally, when we were looking, we only looked on Rightmove and some specialist agricultural property sites. Having seen neighbours struggle to sell their property (only just SSTC after more than a year) and it was on Rightmove, I can’t imagine even less market reach would have been helpful. I never once looked at an estate agent’s social media. But it depends on the type of properties and the types of sales, I suppose.

My parents sold without Rightmove or Zoopla listings recently.

They used an estate agent with a huge social media presence locally and got a good price quickly.

By going with him they did limit their market to local people who follow him on social media or to people who passed by the house and saw the board. So people not in the local area might not have seen the house. But equally if you're thinking of living in a particular area surely you'd check out the local estate agent scene as part of your research?

I think it would work best in a village setting like you say op, with maybe slightly different or more expensive properties. Not so much in a large town or city where there could be 5 similar flats or terraced houses within a couple of streets for sale. In that case people will want to compare them quickly and easily on RM rather than trawling lots of individual agents sites.

And also, would you really be that much cheaper? How much money are we actually talking as a % of the sale?

It wasn't the price that made my parents choose their estate agent, it was his marketing tools and local reputation.

Nope.

I assume that any agent not advertising on Rightmove isn't really operating at the sort of level I want in order to get a sale.

I also avoid significantly cheaper agents for the same reason. I wouldn't touch Purple Bricks etc with a barge pole either.

Selling a house is a major operation these days because of the money involved. I'm an extremely long way from the top end of housing, I live in a 3 bed semi and last sold a 2 bed terrace, but both are worth stupid numbers. I'm not trusting that process to some fly-by-night. Last time i got 3 quotes from established agents who used decent photographers, and went with the one I felt most able to work with and who knew how to market. Asking price offer within ten days and completed sale within 3 months. Looking at some of the photos I've seen on 'why won't my house sell' threads, I don't regret a penny of the fees I paid the agent.

Even the castles and stately homes often go up on Rightmove too.

If only 0.0001% of people could possibly be able and willing to buy it, that's even more reason to advertise it far and wide, to find that exclusively tiny number of people - rather than a standard 3-bed semi that thousands of people could be in the market for.

Nope. I live in a village and if I see a house I might be interested in I go to look it up on Rightmove. If it’s not on there then I move on. It’d have to be a really special house for me to then seek out the estate agent (mostly because I see signs when driving past and don’t often remember the estate agent by the time I get chance to look it up).

In fact there were two houses in my village for sale that I was seriously interested in. One had a sign saying it was for auction so I dismissed that. The other has a sign saying private sale with contact details. If it had been on RightMove and I could see the price and pictures I might have seriously considered moving forward with it as it has a fantastic and unrivalled location. But I’m not going to get in touch with someone only
to find out it’s not at the right price point for me or that the condition isn’t what I’m looking for, so they’ve lost at least one potential buyer by not being on RightMove.

I think Rightmove/Zoopla serves a purpose when it comes to marketing both the house and the estate agent. If you as an agency are not visible on Rightmove or Zoopla you are not going to be at the top of mind for sellers either.

Secondly, having low fees is these days reserved for online agencies who put minimum/no effort into their listings so for most people low fees equals low engagement.

Thirdly, how much of the RM/Zoopla fees will actually be deducted from what the sellers would pay you? If, for example, RM charges £1000 per listing and you deduct £800 from the sellers fees, then you only save £200 for yourself, is that really worth it to risk not reaching a bigger buyer pool? If the saving isn't substantial enough for the seller there is no reason for them to choose you over someone who will make sure their listing is much more visible and reaches further afield.

No, I think the only properties this can work for are very very expensive ones, where the estate agent is more of a broker and has a portfolio of clients with money to spend

But a great many people would do that specifically to cut out the competition and bag a cheap deal.

There's always talk of saving EA fees, yet those fees will frequently pale into insignificance when compared with the much better prices you can get by exposing the house to the whole open market.

I have no doubt that some people who directly canvas for an unadvertised property are doing so in order to significantly underpay an unwary seller.

People are responding to a question about whether they would use an estate agent that didn't advertise properties on Rightmove and of course they are going to base their answer on their own experience.

Presumably if there was already a bustling off-Rightmove market in the OP's area, they wouldn't need to ask the question in the first place.

No, personally I wouldn’t.
Especially with the rise of wfh a lot of people are willing to live further from the city for a better quality of life. My view is that your audience for your market extends beyond those in the immediate vicinity, and I’d be concerned that you weren’t getting the maximum exposure for my property.

If I was happy with a slow sale and the cheaper rates were explained to me, I would consider it, but I wouldn't if there was any sort of urgency (which of course there usually is).

Ah, OK... but even so, I'm not convinced that everybody would think to do that in the first place.

For many people - especially those looking to move to a new locality - they just automatically go to Rightmove and assume that it will cover all available properties.

A bit like many people wanting to buy almost anything instantly go to Amazon - and companies know that they will have to appear on Amazon in order to ever get those eyeballs to see them in the first place, even if they have their own easily-searchable website as well.

Customers/buyers like convenience and familiar brands; you can either accept that and feature under those brands or otherwise instantly cut out an enormous part of your potential customer base.

No

EAs have always paid for advertising - and the EA I knew always complained about the price of it! It's part of the reason why EAs earn more per sale than most Solicitors which, when you consider the level of qualification and responsibility they have, doesn't make sense otherwise. However they do incur extra costs.

When we bought our house over 30 years ago, all houses had printed colour details sheet and, for anything above a starter home, most were two or three sheets long. We wouod be sent these regularly in the post for all houses in our price range. Then they advertised in newspapers - the local ones, the "free" ones and the main county Guardian. They may well have advertised in London to reach second home owners too, although I don't know that.

I'd imagine now all the above have gone. No printing just a digital camera and Rightmove.

I wouldn't, but depends on the house/area/nature of market.

If the local market is really hot it might be possible to get away with it and still get a reasonable price.

But what you are (mostly) doing by not advertising on RM is hampering price discovery. The more people see your place, the more likely you are to get the best price for it.

The reason you employ an agent is not to sell your house. If you want to do that just walk into a pub and shout out that a house is for sale for £5000.

You employ an agent to get the best price for the house you want to sell. And generally you get the best price by advertising to as many potential buyers as possible.

There are certain specialist properties like maybe castles that have such a small number of purchases and are such a specialist market that they probably don't need to be on RM. In this situation it is more important for the agent to be well plugged into the small client base that might actually buy it rather than advertising to the largest number of people.

Are your fees going to be dramatically cheaper if you don’t advertise on Rightmove? That might make a difference to some people.