How common is it for houses to sell without making it to Rightmove?

[Newhousecrying]

I just found out the house down the road (4 doors down) sold for £12k less than we bought ours, and exchanged days after ours (I know that we overpaid and deeply regret it)

We never even saw this other house listed online. There’s no old advert on Zoopla or right move.

How common is this?

We bought our last house off a friend so no estate agent. Then we moved and rented it out. Eventually tenants bought it so again no estate agents. All they were used for was to value it for sale so that we could agree price.

Unless you're buying from a friend, how do people buy before a home goes onto Rightmove? I'm registered with all the local agents, am chain free with a large cash deposit from my previous sale, and am relocating for work, so there's a sense of urgency. Yet no agent ever sends me homes before advertising them or calls me like they did when I was previously looking to buy?
By the time it goes to rightmove I struggle to get a viewing arranged as they are short staffed and already booked up with viewings for various properties. So frustrating.
Then something comes to rightmove showing as sold that day or the next

Honestly, and I know a lot of people don't believe this, not all agents use Right Move.

Or the people down the road might have sold in response to a "we're looking for a house like yours on this specific road" type letter?

Was this during COVID? We had a valuation on our at that time and our local agent had sooooooo many people asking on email she would have started by sending the details to them and only move to the main advertisers if we weren't satisfied with any offers from her bank.

This was Cornwall, a few months into the craziness, and she had put one house up a few weeks earlier on a Saturday morning and returned to work on Monday to 500 messages to deal with on it. People even wanted to offer without viewing! (Which she wouldn't allow).

Don’t think you can say you overpaid. As already posted there are many persons why a house on same road sell at different prices. Try not to beat yourself up. Even if you did overpay, which I very much doubt, £12k over 25 years is less than £1.40 per day.

I have sold several houses over the years and never once used rightmove. Perhaps they are listing with a competitor.

A friend of mine has just had a ‘soft launch’ for their house before it went on RM. So the estate agent contacts likely buyers for about a month before it goes on. They don’t like houses to hang about on RM as buyers get suspicious if they’re in too long. So I imagine there are a lot that never make it onto RM.

Private school whatsapp groups.

Is £12,000 much less? If it’s £100,000 maybe? Over £200,000 not so much. Also was it a “fire sale” ? A desperate sale? Did it have faults? There’s lots of reasons for a price differential. Did they sell to a relative? Not every house gets listed in the platforms.

My parents sold without advertising recently, to a distant cousin who found out they were selling on the family grapevine. Just so happened that my parents house was exactly what they were looking for and my folks were downsizing at that moment in time.... I should think it doesn't happen that often?

I think private sales are fairly common, and the seller will be able to drop the price a little because they are avoiding agents' fees. DD sold to some friends of a neighbour, FTB who loved her road.

I've been posting on local fb groups to see if anyone wants to sell direct but just keep getting people posting links to stuff that's been sat on rightmove for months that's not suitable for me.

I'm on zoopla and on the market and can't seem to find any other sites? Very few people in the area I'm searching seem to use online agents (thankfully) unlike where I was selling.

It's possible it was rented and the landlord sold to the tenant.

I've know that sort of deal.go through at a lower market value because the landlord loses no rent having to evict them, no estate agent charge and some landlords are actually nice people and care about their tenants and want them to be able to afford to buy - maybe that's all their income would stand.

Probably wasn't this but could have been. I've known it happen in the past.

Even with rentals this happens- we have rented 2 lovely places like this- never appeared on Rightmove- so I always pop into the 'best' agents for the type of place we rent and have a face to face chat- and ask them to alert me if anything looks as if it will be coming on - as well as having rightmove alerts set

In our current rental house it had been rented when I called up but I had been in face to face and when it fell through due to the potential tenants buying chain collapsing a week before exchange - agent rang me the same day

2006 - We had just pulled out of a purchase due to something found during the searches. An agent called to say someone had inquired about selling a house that he thought was exactly what we were looking for. It hadn't been listed yet and there were no photos but did we want to view it? We viewed that day, offered and bought it. As far as I know no one else ever saw it. I assume the agent called us because having had a sale fall through he knew we were past the stage of "seeing what's out there" and ready to buy.

@amandaleeds

Your move
Purple bricks

There are others plus regional ones too

Those are both firms of estate agents, albeit not great ones.

They are not portals like Rightmove/Zoopla where multiple agents display their properties for sale.

I’d say it’s fairly common.

When we were looking last year we had sold our house and needed to find one to buy. We had our agent and a couple of other friendly agents constantly contacting us to go and view properties that hadn’t gone on Rightmove or had a sign put up yet, because they knew the area and budget we were looking in, and it was easier for them to put a proceedable buyer in for their client.

Another reason is that people can be very proactive/ghoulish depending on how you look at it. My mum lives in a really nice area where it is pretty much all elderly people in big houses now that the children (us) have flown the nests. Her neighbour died and a young family moved in, then someone across the road died and the young family put a note of interest through the door on behalf of their friends, so that house sold to another young family. Then someone up the road a bit went into a care home; same thing happened and another young family moved in. None of these went on the market.

In your situation the house could have sold to a family member, been rented and sold to tenants or any number of scenarios. You can sell for less if you know you’re not going to be paying estate agent fees.

My dear old dad said you should stop looking once you’ve found the one you want (houses, cars etc) so that you don’t take the shine off the one you were so happy with until you saw the better/cheaper one!

Edit: damn, I didn’t see the date on the original post, sorry!

It's rare but possible for things to sell quickly.

Generally it means it is underpriced.

Someone I know recently sold on the first day it went on RM.

Just as houses languishing around for ever indicates they are overpriced, ones that are snapped up quickly are generally underpriced.

A friend of my in laws got an offer on their bungalow without it going on RM, they had a list of potential buyers when she approached them to sell.

It has fallen through though but I'm not sure if that's any more likely or just one of those things?

Ours did, 6 or 7 years ago. The estate agent had a buyer she knew would drop their current purchase as our house was better located. I think they made an offer before we'd even had the brochure printed.It meant a very quick sale, due to their chain, we completed in 5 weeks and went into a rental. So it did go into Rightmove but as SSTC. So it pays to be known to the estate agents.

On our estate lots of houses are sold off market to family, or by word of mouth and leafleting. It's a very popular area with lots of elderly residents meaning houses don't come up often and there is lots of competition when they do.

We bought ours as a probate house after a neighbour told my mum who lives on the same street that the son was selling so we popped a note through the door.

I know of a couple of school mums in the same position, one bought from her own parents, our neighbour did a kind of house swap where they bought the large family home from it's elderly residents and sold their smaller house on same estate to them in exchange.

Another neighbour was pre registered with the estate agent who let them view prior to going to Rightmove so they still got their transaction fee but with none of the hassle.

I think the really good stuff often goes this way.

One house in our street - not on RM , I searched by postcode but nothing on any other sites . I wanted to have a nosey at the pictures.
It sold

Yes they never seem to have anything different to what's on rightmove. It's just do frustrating to keep contacting agents to remind them I'm looking and what my criteria is, only to see a house appear on rightmove and then be told there are no viewing slots available or seeing things appear on rightmove as sold that never even had an ad out.

Maybe I'll just have print off a few hundred letters and post them through letterboxes of all the streets I like.