Twice As Fast – At One-Tenth Of The Price

Ever since the property heyday of 2007, when sales peaked at over a million, the market has been facing difficult times, the kind that UK estate agents hadn’t seen since the early 1990′s.

Then though, whilst prices dropped and buyers were few and far between having been scared off from buying a home in the wake of price drops, at least sellers were motivated to sell. In the face of 15% interest rates they had to be. Mortgage payments trebled in 1990 and rather focussed the mind of those seeking to strike a deal whereby they had little option but to acquiesce to a buyer’s offer, no matter how low it seemed. The alternative when you couldn’t afford to pay your lender back was inevitable repossession otherwise.

But during some property downturns, there was at least some kind of liquidity, even if property values did suffer. These days, though, the story is different. Buyers are nervous, the media pumps out doom and gloom and these historically low interest rates mean sellers can choose whether or not to accept an offer, so transactional volumes remain below the half-million mark. And this is the reason why so many otherwise sellable properties have been sitting on the market for so long with no buyer interest, and why so many similar properties have gone onto the temporary rental market while their owners sit and wait for the market to recover.

According to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, it takes the average UK home 109 days to sell. And the vast majority of those sales are thanks to any of the 10,000 traditional High Street estate agencies across the UK. But on closer inspection, it’s not the typical agency – the one with high overheads spread across multiple branch offices – that’s selling from the enquires it receives itself, but rather those few sales made these days are due to internet enquiries, in particular through Rightmove Estate Agents.

According to ComRes, visits to the UK’s busiest property portals increased during May 2011. 13.8 million unique visits were recorded that month, to Rightmove, Zoopla, Prime Location and Find a Property – that’s up 20% on May 2010. And interestingly enough, statistics from one of the UK’s leading online estate agents paint a much more positive picture. eMoov recently announced that it takes them, on average, just 42 days to sell a home – less than half the time more traditional offline estate agents take to make that sale, and at a tenth of the price.

‘The majority of people search online for their next home and that’s where our very extensive marketing is concentrated’, declares eMoov’s founder, Russell Quirk. He adds ‘Our offering is far cheaper than old fashioned estate agents and now provably twice as successful in selling property.’ So if you’re currently having reservations about the length of time it’s going to take to sell your property in this kind of economic climate, and about the size of the estate agents fees then you should be looking into eMoov.co.uk, because they seem to have found the solution,

Going to high street estate agents means paying high estate agents fees. Using eMoov, the UK’s leading online estate agents instead will get your property sold by showing it to 170 million internet visitors each month. No extortionate commissions, no percentage fees, no sole agency tie ins. Just a range of fixed, low cost estate agents fees which might even make you start to like estate agents again.