Worth leaflet dropping when searching for a house?*

[permana]

*When life returns to normal of course.

I am looking to buy a house in the area I currently rent, so I'm already local.
I want a house in quite a specific area because I have a horse stabled near-by and want to be close by.

There are always a couple of houses in that area on the market (the slightly smaller houses) , but never the ones I am interested in, which are more the slightly larger family homes - I understand why, they are the sort of places people stay in for 20+ years.

I was wondering if it's worth leafleting the houses I think are in my budget and the right size I'm looking for?
If so, what do I write? I get a million estate agents leaflet through my door normally, so I guess I have to stand out from those?
There is also a rented house that would be ideal, do you think it's worth trying to contact the landlord to see if they are interested in selling?

Has anyone done this?

We did! We knew the area and knew the streets we preferred so we wrote a friendly, to the point letter, dropped it off and got 2-3 replies. One house we liked and the owners got 3 valuations, we offered and it was accepted.

We already had an offer on ours so it was just a matter of contacting solicitors and getting the conveyancing process in place. We sold our house through a estate agent but the owner of the one we bought didn't use an EA. We have been in the house 3 years now.

We did it on Facebook once we were sold but we had nowhere to go, we had 5/6 replies including one from the daughter of the house we eventually bought saying her parents would be open to offers, we'd discounted the house already on Rightmove as it was too expensive.

Sounds ideal Monday!

Do you mean your own FB page....or the 'local' group page @furryleopard ?

I went on the local page and asked if anyone in the area was thinking of selling, we got some linking to ones already on the market that we'd discounted and then our now house which we'd discounted for being too expensive which we ended up buying.

We've done this twice. In one area we had one person contact us but in the end the house wasn't the right one for us. The second time again we had one reply but ended up buying the house that we are now in. But the vendor having saved money on not using an estate agent then also went on to do everything as cheaply as possible and used an online solicitor who was disbarred soon after for shady practice!

We did but it was a waste of time. Only person to contact us wasnt really sure about selling - wanted more than market value for her house - which had a number of problems - to buy in a more expensive area. We went for a completely different area in the end and it turned out to be a good choice.

Def yes. We did when looking. We saw 4 properties before they went on the market.

We did but it didn't work for us. We used yellow paper, typed it in a non professional looking way as we didn't want to be thought of as dodgy estate agents. We did get calls, two were over a year after our leaflet drop!