How I Saved Over £7000 Selling My House with Doorsteps

Doorsteps is an online estate agency and is an area I haven’t yet explored as to how much money they can save you when you sell your house.

As I am always on the lookout for new and creative ideas on how to save money. So what better way to save it, than  on the most valuable asset you will probably ever own – your home.

 

So how do you save thousands on estate agent fees on your house sale?

 

Today, I’m excited to introduce you to our guest, Paul from over at Money Tips Blog.

 

He is an established financial expert, on the cutting edge of the Fintech scene in the heart of London.  He offers actionable tips anyone wanting to save money on a range of household costs. His expertise on how to invest wisely offers inspiring reading for anyone wondering how to navigate the current financial situation of 2019.

 

Paul’s mission is to show that the potentially bewildering topic of fund and shares buying is accessible to the average person.

Recently he has saved a fortune on estate agents costs.

 

Now let’s hand over to Paul…

I think young business leaders are incredible. The CEO of the company I work for is 23 years old and my manager’s manager is the the same age. I’ve seen first-hand that age doesn’t preclude you from achieving great things in business.

So when the time came to sell my house last year, I instantly recalled an interview I had seen some months previous with Akshay Ruparelia, 20 year old founder of Doorsteps estate agents.

 

Doorsteps is a new challenger estate agent, capitalising on the growing realisation that for years estate agents have been paid rather a lot for doing relatively little. When I went onto their website, I was amazed to see they advertise fees starting at £99.

 

I couldn’t quite believe it, so much so that I started to doubt the legitimacy of the business. Maybe it was probably in part due to the website looking like it was designed in 1995.

But this guy had been featured on This Morning and Holly Willoughby wouldn’t lie to me, would she?

 

So I decided to give Doorsteps a try.

 

I opted for the £199 package over the £99 one, as it includes professional photographs and I didn’t own a quality, wide angle lens camera.

 

Click me for site.

(This is not an affiliate link – there aren’t any affiliate links within this post)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Within a few days, an agent came over to take the photos and we discussed price, and what I wanted to include in the ad description.

Initial Service Review

One thing worth noting here is that the agent appeared to cover a large patch: she had driven up from Brighton, and my house was in South-East London, so she didn’t have much knowledge of the local area. She also seemed pretty apathetic to what price I should list my property at.

Putting those couple of negatives aside, when the Zoopla and Rightmove ads went up a couple days later, I remarked that the photos she had taken were excellent.

Things to Expect

Doorsteps is, like most of the other new estate agents, will book viewings in for you. Then you have to do the viewings yourself.

In my experience, buyers book a viewing for the next day. This starts to become annoying when you have to forgo social occasions because you’ve got a viewing to host.

Top Tip

Organise an “open day” for an upcoming weekend – I’d highly recommend it

Pin me for later!

 

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Consider Upgrading

Another tip I would share is that, if you’re struggling for viewings, as I was at the beginning, you should consider upgrading your Zoopla and Rightmove ads to “Premium Listings“.

Nowadays, people aren’t going to look in estate agent windows to look at houses, they’re sat on the sofa perusing Zoopla on their iPad.

Premium Listings help your ad stand out by showing more photos in the search results page, receiving 70% more page views as a result.

Using Doorsteps how much did I save?

Price Comparison

Background Information

So including these ad upgrades, in total I spent £350 with Doorsteps, and I completed on my house sale in just over 3 months.

To be transparent, I sold my two-bed terrace for £271,000. For the sake of comparison, let’s look at how that stacks up against two traditional estate agents and one online agent.

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House Sale – 2 Bed Terrace 

 

                                    Total Price         Total Price            Total Price 

                                        London          North West          East Anglia  

                                                                    (Darwen, Lancs)        (Norwich)

                                         £271,000            £95,000                  £180,000

 Traditional Agents  

 Foxtons                      £8,130               £2850                    £5,400

(3% fee)

Farrell & Heyworth

(1% fee)                          £2710                   £950                         £1800

 

Internet Based Agents  

Purple Bricks                £ 899                   £899                          £899

(fixed fee)

Doorsteps                       £350                   £350                          £350

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If I considered, for example Foxton’s realtor fees as opposed to Doorsteps…

 

Savings                £7,780               £2500                        £5,050

 

But how can Doorsteps be so cheap?

Now you may be wondering how Doorsteps can operate as a business with such cheap prices charged for selling realty?

Upon listing my property with them, I was pretty hard sold on what they describe as an “in house conveyancing service”.

They boast that clients complete on their sale faster, since Doorsteps act as both the agent and the solicitor.

Elated that I had been able to sell my house and pay such a small fee, I decided to go with Doorsteps’ conveyancing and this turned out to be a mistake.

Pay a bit more for a conveyancer you know will deliver

The “in house service” turned out to be, in fact, a partnership with one PCS Legal.

PCS were painfully slow and poor at communicating, and this proved to be a bottleneck in the process once I had accepted an offer.

In Summary

Other than that, Doorsteps were a delight to deal with – I couldn’t recommend them more. If you’re putting your property on the market soon, why not give them a try?

 

Have you saved masses of cash on estate agents fees?

Or have you got any questions you would like to ask Paul?

Feel free to comment below.

 

More about Paul

Check out Paul’s blog here. I particularly like his post on ‘How to Invest in 2019’

This is my identified area of finance now to learn more about, in conjunction with Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps plan (invest step). I found the information and links highly user friendly and easy to access as a beginner.

Read my review of Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover and how I use it with my budget binder.