Have you sold a house yourself?

[JDW1957]

We have a fantastic 5 bedroomed detached house at the foot of the south downs, with a great village school and close to some of the best private schools in Sussex. It's been the perfect family home!
We are downsizing and I would like to avoid costly estate agents fees.
Has anyone got experience of doing this themselves
All tips welcome
JDW

Did you mean just estate fees or solicitor, too?

We did both private sale & own conveyancing on our own house sale.

Private sale: works best when your house is very desirable and word of mouth will be enough to get a sale; but I think you can still get it listed on Rightmove by various means.

Conveyancing: I used a volume on the market on how to do it.
Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork! But it was great because there was no waiting for our solicitor, we hand-delivered communications to their solicitor same day as received their comms sometimes. We always knew what was going on. I don't know if it's still as straightforward now as it was then (2003-04).

Then the sale collapsed between exchange & completion, we couldn't call in the professional solicitor fast enough to sort it out.
I think it's alright to do as long as you know your limits.

Second time we sold, I can't remember if we self-conveyanced or not! We did use a regular estate agent because we knew by then we had exhausted the word-of-mouth route.

you CANNOT get on rightmove etc as a private seller; and very people look anywhere except the big sites. The only cheaper way to do it is via the online agents, who charge a few hundred quid up front. They will of course do nothing to progress the sale afterwards.

you can get decent solicitors who will charge about £500 (plus the disbursements which have to be paid anyway) for this kind of sale. Conveyancing isn't rocket science but if you get it wrong, you could be up for big bucks.

I thought about using an online agent, but got a 'real' agent round for a valuation. We sold through the real agent for 20% more than we planned to price the house ourselves, so his fee about 7% of that increase was well worth it.

I think there are agents who charge a set fee for their services (rather than % of the final price). Also, there are cut-price agencies which are mostly self-sell procedure but give access to somewhere like RightMove. That's what I was thinking of as a half way measure for OP.