Its certainly dramatically cheaper for me, i do almost everything myself. I have been checking on building supplies etc, everything from nails to plasterboard is much cheaper.

Try and sell it yourself privately now ( http://www.hotproperties.com.au/ or http://www.buymyplace.com.au/sellers...-landing.aspx? just a couple of sites for private buyers/sellers).

If nothing happens then pull it off the market for a few months before you hand it over to an estate agent to work their magic and consider an auction - dont know if they are a big deal where you are but a good percentage of Canberra houses go to auction these days.

Good luck!

Go Gecko are supposed to be quite good and have fixed, very reasonable, commision rates. What they do and don't do to earn that I have no idea but a friend sold her place through them with no problem.

dont know about qld but in SA go gecko are a franchise chain so even if one office is good another may be complete idiots ... a bit like the office we bought our house through. Our mortgage advisor actually called them incompetent along with rather a lot of unrepeatable things!!

Owner.com.au. Is another site commonly used up here x

Go gecko up here all shut down, did read they had gone bust, obviously not australia wide if others still have them.

Just looking at the buy my place one, after the initial fee, an upgrade to get it on RE.com is 499 for first month then 99 month.

Agency/method of sale aside, how is anyone on the market right now finding it??.

Of course, that applies to any business doing anything, they are only as good as their staff.

Post #11

I used Go Gecko last June to sell my house and had no problems with them - it saved me over $11,000 in commission compared to other agents. I think most estate agents are much of a muchness.

To come back to the original question about when to sell your house - it depends what your next move is and whether you want to buy again. We sold when the market was down - and it still is - and we did not get what we hoped for, but we had to sell due to marriage break up. But having sold it enabled me to put in a silly offer on another house which was accepted.

Don't pay ANYTHING up front. Use a Jenman approved agent. No sale, no costs. Extremely ethical selling methods. Find the right agent, and what the market's doing doesn't matter. They can identify the serious buyers and still get a good price.

Don't auction!!! You get the second best price. Get a really skillful agent showing two or three people through separately but in succession (3.30, 3.45, 4.00 pm for example) Then he will be negotiating back and forth between them conducting a "silent auction" which will get you the best price because they don't know what the last bid was, only that they have to beat it. There was $7.5k between the top silent bid and the next one on my sale 2 weeks ago.