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

[RavenHouse]

Would love your opinion. Is this a good idea?
I've been an estate agent for a long time, have worked for a number of companies and most recently for myself.
Rightmove have of course cornered the market and agents pay monthly fees to them now, in the thousands to have the privilege of advertising on their site.
Would you use an agent who cut their customers fees down by thousands but didn't advertise on Rightmove/Zoopla etc? and instead used social media and word of mouth?
This would be in a village setting, it wouldn't work for cities. Only a local agent within a small area.
There would still be a sale board at the property and the process would be exactly the same. It would just mean it would cost the customer much less in fees, a small flat fee instead of a costly percentage.
I'd be interested to get your thoughts?

I think it depends, as a seller I wouldn't care how the agent find the buyer. When demand is high, our local agents have a list of potential buyers they know are procedeable and reliable. They wouldn't advertise immediately on Rightmove or Zoopla if they have interested buyers.

I guess I would want some kind of clause in the contract that says that if you as the agent cannot provide a minimum of 4-5 offers within the first couple of weeks, or if the first accepted offer fall through, then you will advertise on Rightmove etc.

As a buyer, I only look at Rightmove though.
I'm also wondering how potential sellers would find you? We only know the agents we met through our renting and buying experience, and would be hesitant to trust anyone we've never work with before.

Does everybody from outside the area who is looking to move there know about the local version of RM?

Or is it a local village for local people only?!

Before the internet, and even still, at least in cities Estate agents tended to have their bricks and mortar offices very close to each other so it was easy to window shop that way - Rightmove is the online equivalent. And the shop window advertising was backed up by newspaper advertising, so really all Rightmove is is the digital equivalent of that, but with a much wider and more accessible reach.

And no, I wouldn’t go with an agent who didn’t use Rightmove.

If you google property/house for sale in <city> the local site comes up beside rightmove. I reckon most people selling here if they had to choose they would opt for the local option over Rightmove. It is the “go to” and has thousands of properties on it.

The city I live in has a different first place to look, that isn't Rightmove, so it can be a bit redundant. However, I don't think this is the kind of social change a single estate agent would be able to force, if the part of the country you are in has this as a default.

There's a question above asking what someone could do if they saw a "for Sale" sign and didn't go straight to Rightmove, would they have to go to the home owner. If I saw a for sale sign, I would google "For sale, such and such street, city name" and it would show up whatever the agent.

Absolutely not.

we put ours up and didn’t bother with a sale board. No one goes driving around these days. People scroll rightmove.

No

A lot of the agents websites are awful,

I'm looking at buying in a particular area at the moment and honestly wading through the agent site to get the info I need it is a nightmare.

(Disabled, need a ground floor flat)

Your idea might work. In a busy market if you have buyers etc. but you'd need a good website of your own.

No to RightMove. Yes to Zoopla. Rightly or wrongly, RightMove are the Hoover of house sales and I wouldn't bother if my house wasn't on there.

There was a thread a little while back about people putting notes through the letterboxes of houses they were interested in buying, should the owners happen to be interested in selling.

That was one of my big concerns too: how can you possibly know that the price you arrive at privately is not way less (or indeed way more) than you could have got/paid on the open market?

Maybe if it was Tesco, who had done their research and were determined to have your exact location for a new store, whatever the price; or if Elon Musk set his heart on it for whatever reason and gladly told you to name your price.

But in the real world, the vast majority of sellers realise that they won't get much more than the market dictates; and most buyers know they won't get an astonishing bargain that's well below market value.

Absolutely no way

You need a valuation to get a mortgage so if the buyer is going to have to borrow there will need to be some kind of assessment done officially. When i put notes through doors it was not to do a deal unofficially or get a cheap deal, it was to find unavailable property more quickly and possibly buy without the property having to be advertised.

For the 2m+ market then maybe.

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

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.

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.

No

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.