elksa

I've been surfing this site for around 8 months now and over this time I've read many a thread regarding so to be expats dissatisfaction with Estate Agents.

For the past year a friend and I have been developing a website named StopPayingEstateAgents that will enable people to buy and sell there houses privately (I've seen a few threads on this subject in the past as well). Although not a new idea this is the first one I have seen which provides this service to the seller and buyer for free.

Unfortunately for most of you, you will not be able to use this service as at first we are restricting it to only properties for sale around the area where we live (South East Essex). If all goes well then we will expand but at first it's just properties local to us.

If anyone fancies taking a look, any comments you may have would be welcomed and appreciated. Feel free to register even if you are not from the local area. The more hits and registrations we get the sooner we can start charging companies to advertise, which will enable us to expand and continue offering the service for free.

www.StopPayingEstateAgents.co.uk

P.S. If there’s anyone from the local area that wants to register their house but the town they live is not available within the list then let me know and I'll see if I can add your town to the list for you. The site only went live this morning so at present the only property on it is mine.

If you know anyone else that may not use this site but might be interested in maximising there chances of selling or buying through using this website we'd appreciate all the word of month you can offer.

Thanks

moneypenny20

Had a quick look (even though I'm in Herts). Looks good.

Lots of luck.

ZimBabe

Hi,

Had a quick look and tried some searching (I know there is only 1 property at the moment). 2 things I can see people getting frustrated at are:

1) The screen is Pink/Red and white, a bit bright!

2) When searching it reverts back to the original information that is there already, instead of staying on what you imput i.e. Price £100000 to £180000. It would also help if there was an option to search for Ip to 6 bedrooms instead of just 1,2,3,4, etc.

On the plus side I really admire you for taking this step, and if you did it yourself well done, I can barely master the Internet, let alone make up an interactive webpage!!!

lauralollipop

What a bloody brilliant idea elska!!

I will have a look at the site, if you add teesside on your site i will defo advertise my house on it as will be wanting to sell me house very soon......


laura
xxxx

elksa

Thanks for the words of support and advice guys there all much appreciated.

Thanks for the comments Zimbabe, A couple of people have said it looks a bit bright. In the long run I may have to tone it down abit. However, initially whilst we try and get some sort of small foothold on the web I was after a color scheme that would kind of jump out at people.

Good point about the searching on the front page. Sometimes when your involved in the development of it for several hours each week some of the more obvious and potentially annoying facets are overlooked. I'll make those changes in the near future.

lauralollipop, Thanks for taking a look, any comments appreciated. I look forward to the day when people in teeside can put there properties on the site, because if that's the case it will obviously have been a great success and help to many people.

Neither of us are in it to make large sums of money but instead for the satisfaction and enjoyment we may get from helping lots of people save some money and hopefully eget a better and less stressfull property buy/sell experience. In fact at present the site costs us £50 a month to run, but hopefully if we can charge companies to advertise then we should be able to run it and expand it without it costing us anything.

Thanks guys.

lauralollipop

Elska,

i have had a look and i think its fab.....

what about internal photos aswell, can you include them?? or even foor plans etc???


I think it wilkl defo take off (as noone wants to pay the estate agents fees as so expensive for soo little work). You just need to advertise it, as soon as everyone knows about it, then estate agents will go bankrupt, ha,ha!!

Think it will defo be woth adding all towns on there and doing a bit of advertising, maybe on the radio or local newspapers, in the property sections, it will certainly be worth the advertising costs as i cannot see who wouldnt want to use it.

Good luck

laura
xxx

Sue from Manchester

Elksa

Any chance of it expanding up North, like Manchester? We had our house on the market a couple of years ago and in 8 weeks only had one viewer and they only came across the road for a nosy. It was supposed to be a well respected local estate agent but I don't know what they did for their money, it certainly wasn't much. We're looking to put our house on the market at Easter.

Sue

lauralollipop

just found out how to see inside photos, yes i think its good. wish i had thought of it first..

good luck, sure you wont need it

laura
xx

Marlo

[QUOTE=elksa]

Hi Elksa,

I've just had a brief look at your web site and it looks great, I like the red!!

Can I ask you if you advertise the properties else where i.e. Right Move?

Very interested in your site,

Thanks

elksa

[QUOTE=Marlo] Unfortunatly not at present. We looked into doing this but whilst we are not making any money it's unfeasible. It would cost us around £250 a month to advertise the websites properties on rightmove or asserta homes, etc... At present we can't afford that sort of outlay.

However, I have my property on both because the estate agent I am with advertises on Right Move and I've added it to our site. At the moment not many people are accessing the site however we are going to be starting a local advertising campaign within the next week or so once the posters, boards and leaflets are printed, so should hopefully get a little more interest.

Do you live around this area? If so let me know and I'll try and get you a board and or poster to put up for nothing if you want to add your house to the site. It doesn''t affect any sole agency agreement you may have with an estate agent, because we are not actually estate agents.

Thanks.