I have officially called off the estate agents from selling my house now. The market seems to be dropping and although I had a few offers, one of which seems to have been fair in the current market, they simply weren’t good enough to make it worth my while. After all there is no actual reason for me to move, I was simply aiming to stop the commute, but I’ve been doing it for five years, another year won’t hurt.
What became clear is that you can’t rely on your estate agent to push for the best price for your house. I hadn’t really though about it in detail until I read the book Freakonomics recently. My agent was on a fee of 1.5% of the sale value of my house, obviously I want to get the best price for it. If I get an offer that is £7,000 under my asking price that’s quite a big gap from my point of view but from the agent’s side they get a sale and only lose £105. For every thousand it goes under the asking price they lose £15, hardly a good incentive to look for a better offer. Not sure what a better way to approach it would be, maybe a sliding percentage scale so that the closer to the asking price the sale goes the rewards increase.
Anyway, what it does mean is two things, I can continue to save for another 6 months or so to put me in a stronger position the next time I try and, more importantly (!) I can book my place at Lotusphere ’06.
