Has anyone sold/bought a house privately? I.e. not through an estate agent?

[dustbunniesmakegreatpets]

I was wondering about this last night, when indulging in property porn researching potential future homes on rightmove. I've never had a good experience with an estate agent (and I've never sold a home, only bought) and would love to avoid them if at all possible. But how would buyers find you?

Has anyone tried/done this? How does it work? What would your advice be to others who wanted to sell without going through an estate agent?

I guess that's a no then!

No experience of it - I now what you mean about Estate Agents but I view them as a necessary evil. We've just lost a buyer from hell - I'm really glad we had the cushion of an EA between us and them.

Sarah Beeny has set up a house selling website - www.tepilo.com for people to do it themselves. I think you save quite a bit on fees but you do have to do all the negotiations with the buyers yourself.

Assuming you will then buy another house - the estate agents / vendor may be less happy dealing with you if you don't have an EA for the sale though. We wouldn't have got our offer accepted if we weren't selling through an EA, and at the moment they are giving us time to find another buyer, again if we were selling ourselves, I don't think they would be so patient.

We bought our last house privately and dealt directly with the vendors. I thought it was fantastic actually, as you just had real people negotiating with each other - it stopped anyone from behaving like an arse when you know you've got to say whatever it is to the person's face! My husband is normally a really hard-ball negotiator but he found it hard to maintain because they were just really nice people wanting to sell up in London and buy a family home in Devon.

This was back in 2005, and all they had was a home-made sign outside the house. Luckily another house was on the market two doors down, and it was when we went to look at that one we saw the sign and knocked on the door. I don't think they marketed it on the internet at all, but managed to sell within weeks.

Hmm, well we bought our last house from friends, and then when we moved we sold it to another set of friends! But that's not what you meant.

Is there a lot on the market in your area? I mean houses comparable to yours? Because if not, there may well be potential buyers sitting in rented houses waiting for something to come on the market (that's the position we're in!). So totally worth sticking your own "for sale" board up outside and seeing what happens.

Or, there are "estate agents" like housenetwork, who do you an advert on Rightmove and organise viewings (telephone service) but don't do much beyond that.

All very interesting posts, thanks very much. We're not actually looking to move at the moment, but we're thinking of moving in the next year or so, so it wasn't entirely idle curiosity! We'll definitely try the home-made sign thing and see what happens - I hadn't heard of housenetwork either, so that sounds like a good idea too.