How to Sell Without an Estate Agent
Sarah Beeny's new website advertises homes without the need for an estate agent
Sarah Beeny, Channel 4 presenter and mother of four is intent on revolutionising the way we buy and sell houses.
Beeny's new site www.Tepilo.com matches buyers and sellers without the need for an estate agent. And if the global success of her dating website, www.mysinglefriend.com, is anything to go by, it will fly.
On Tepilo.com, home-sellers can advertise their property for sale or rent at no cost, along with pictures, floor plans and maps. It is seriously sleek – more like a glossy magazine than a website.
Beeny assures that a complete computer dunce could upload their home onto it in less than 15 minutes. The site includes information on buying, selling and letting; it will help you to arrange a Home Information Pack; and remind you when you have a viewing or need to contact your solicitor.
Really, she couldn't have picked a better time to appeal to people's thriftiness. The economic crisis destroyed people's confidence in the property market, and those who were making money out of it. "House prices had to go down and did so quite quickly. But this is good in a way. Now the property market is a more realistic place and we're probably safer. Human beings like a disaster story and there hadn't been one for a while. People are ready for a shake-up," Beeny says.
A crash, she says, makes you question whether what you're doing makes sense. "A lot of people were doing things that were a waste of money. Now they look at their credit-card bills harder. If you're bad value for money I'd be worried right now."
Estate agents, this means you. "It was money for old rope. Now those that survive will be the one's that have had to shape up," she says. "There will always be estate agents because some people are too busy, or lazy to sell their house themselves. But we will use them in the way we use travel agents or wedding planners."
"Already 99 per cent of buyers are finding their homes online. I would be amazed if by 2015 about 50 per cent of normal people with normal houses weren't selling them directly online. Yes, some people may employ somebody to put the property online for them – to take the pictures and draw the floor plans. But this will cost £8 per hour, not thousands of pounds."
That's not to say selling a home is easy; Tepilo.com is designed to guide you through all the various stages of the process.
"For me, websites have got to be simple and straightforward. I wouldn't know how to make details look pretty or take the right photographs. Tepilo helps with all that, and finding a solicitor."
The idea is that by cutting out the middleman – that is the estate agent – the transaction will go more smoothly. "It brings the seller and the solicitor closer together. The more people in a conversation, the longer it takes," Beeny says.
There are now more than 6,000 homes advertised on Tepilo.com, either for sale, or for rent. "I didn't think it would get so big so fast, and I didn't think we'd have a sale so quickly. Within three weeks, a house had sold and in two months there were 5,000 properties. The site is flying – people were even uploading properties on Christmas Day."
Does she worry about competition from rival websites? "There are other sites, but they just don't do it very well. It's important to make sure ours is the best," she says.
For Tepilo.com to take off, Beeny is dependent on people buying and selling houses – difficult in an uncertain market, which she admits is unlikely to improve significantly over the next 12 months.
"I know a lot of people waiting for prices to jump up and I think they will be waiting a long time," Beeny says.
She has no plans to invest in property this year, mainly because she is in the process of restoring a large house ("a passion project") and has recently given birth to her fourth child, Laurie. "We've been working on the personnel portfolio, not the home portfolio recently," she says.
But that's not to say she won't be keeping her eye out for good deals on Tepilo.com. "I've been interested in property since I was 19," she says. "My father was an architect and we had a development and investment company. Before I was on television, property was all I did." Thus her friends weren't particularly surprised when she started up Tepilo.com, particularly given her interest in matchmaking.
"Any tool that makes life simple is a good thing. Property's internet revolution has been a long time in coming. It's exciting to see change."
The site isn't about to turn Beeny into a millionaire property tycoon, though – it has not been set up as a profitmaking venture. "Buildings are tools to live in – it's the people that are interesting," she says. But in the future she hopes sponsorship will enable the site to pay for itself, and start making some money.
"I've got a good feeling about it," says Sarah Beeny. "Thousands of couples wouldn't be together if it wasn't for mysinglefriend.com. It would be nice to be responsible for revolutionising the way people buy and sell houses."