The Little House Company, which for 15 years has been a For Sale By Owner private sales website, is relaunching itself later this month with a bid to include estate agents.
It says in its new guise, to be called TheHouseShop.com, it will offer vendors a gateway to access all the ways to sell a home. These will include FSBO but will also have leads to online and high street estate agents as well as property auctions.
No content pages from the new site have been made available to view so far and to date the home page on www.thehouseshop.com promises your new source of vendor leads' and describes itself as the UK's no.1 place for properties.'
Nick Marr, co-founder of the site, tells EAT that the site has links with some 4,143 high street agents; most are located outside London and have fewer than 10 staff.
Regarding online estate agents, we are reaching out to these companies when we launch as The House Shop. Previously our model appeared to conflict with them says Marr.
With listings from direct sellers, online agents, high street agents, property auctions and new homes and accessible property developers, TheHouseShop's unique mix of properties will not be found on other major portals which cater exclusively to agents he says.
Marr believes traditional portals have the misguided notion that estate agents and private sellers should not work together although he admits that 90 per cent of the site's customers will in reality use an agent.
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Comments
PeeBee, thank you for your consent to laugh as hard as I like...and I will. This idea has been tried before...don't you remember Fish4Homes, Propertyfinder etc, etc They had multiple listings from agents, online agents and FSBO - they didn't work/last despite substantial financial backing. This idea is doomed. Yes "some people" will list on it but that is hardly a measure of success. FSBO Houseweb has been going for 19 years because "some people" list on it but it hasn't changed how the agency market operates.
An Expert, the article says 90% of their customers use agents any way. I trawl private seller website already for new vendor leads, this is great, its going to make my job a lot easier, far from knocking nails in a coffin.
Autotrader = private and professional sellers
Tripadvisor = private and professional sellers
Airbnb = just private so far, although actually some huge property-owning groups are on there so not dissimilar
Ebay = private and professional sellers
And they're all worth $ squillions
might need some tweaks to applicants' agreements..!
Clients can use this as an insurance package to make sure their agent keeps on his toes :)
I'm an agent. Although sceptical at first, I have been thinking about this model and will watch and then consider listing. If this site gets traction it will have unique properties (the owner listings) and I know from experience that some people will always want to save by doing it themselves on a good site but others will want to use us. And some will use both.
Nick - you can laugh as loud and hard as you like - but as sure as eggs is eggs SOMEONE will list their property there...
It's a given.
Anyone heard of Uber..
Uber X = fsbo
Uber Exec = online agent
Uber Lux = traditional agent
Get used to the future. The punters will love this.
Ha ha ha ha, hang on let me read this again....ha ha ha ha.....estate agents listing on a FSBO site!!.......oooh I need a lie down.
Any agent who supports FSBO sites would be stupid. You might as well allocate space in your window for private sellers to put up tbeir own advert.
If such sites remove FSBO/private ads then it would be worth listing on
By agents giving ckntent your knocking nails in your own coffins.