Leaflet/letter asking if anyone selling

[Purplecarrots]

We’ve fallen in love with an area, and have been looking for properties there for a while. We did view one (only on on sale, has been for 2 years), but the house requires a lot of work, and the lady is not willing to accept lower offer (too expensive considering all the work).
Anyway, DH mentioned he came across the concept of sending letters to people in the two streets asking if anyone is willing to sell. This seems odd to me. We did receive such letter ourselves twice (rental so we couldn’t do anything and landlord not willing to sell).
However, I’m after general opinions, do you think this is odd? Or acceptable?
Thank you

I don’t think it’s odd at all. Thers a lovely street near to us with a green and in the catchment for an outstanding primary. I know of one family who got there house by doing these letters.

We had one through our letter box, I rang the lady and said that I knew two were coming up for sale and she ended up getting one.

I've previously bought a house this way. What have you got to lose? They'll either bin the letter if they're not interested or you may just save someone considering moving a ruck load of estate agents fees. Good luck!

We have had some of these, it is a popular area with good schools. Am hoping there will be another one in a year or so as I am ready to move on.

I did this - I'd been waiting 9 months for a suitable property to come up so decided to letterbox about 30 houses over 2 of the streets I really liked. I used a disposable email address as I didn't want to take calls from strangers and had a response from someone who was thinking about moving, but in the end I fell for another house before they were ready to sell. However, it's another 6months on and no more houses have come up in that area so I feel content that I "did my best" to get exactly what I wanted and haven't missed out on something. I also know someone who did get their dream home this way. Good luck!

Me too. We had been looking to move to a village and not much comes up so we posted leaflets through the doors of the houses in the streets we liked. I said we were looking to move there as we really liked the area and if they were thinking of selling or knew of anyone selling now or in the near future to please contact us. We had several people got in touch and we took it from there - they got their house valued by estate agents and we made an offer based on these valuations. We are actually in our house that we found in this way. It cuts out estate agents fees.

We tried this, we wanted to move to a larger house on the same road (only decent road in the immediate area and the road where my disabled MIL lives, we wanted to stay close to her) so put a letter through all the doors of the larger houses on the road saying we were going to put our house on the market and if anyone would be interested in selling we'd be glad to hear from them. Had two sets of people ask to look at our house (I think just out of sheer nosiness TBH!) but nobody offer to sell to us!

As PP said though, nothing to lose and its worth a try.