DIY real estate - any experience ?
Hello,
Following bizarre experiences with real estate agents am wondering about selling our house ourselves.
The main issues have been
1) Agents seem to have little control over how the house is presented on the different web sites. After appropriate feedback and editing they can do a reasonable job on their own websites but they seem to have little control of how the data portals extract and present the same data on other sites. Some shocking misrepresentation is possible.
2) Data Formats - If the estate agents could clearly define a specific data format to ensure a good clean data flow from us to their database that then feeds brochures and web sites that would be great, however its like the death of a 1000 cuts and we learn a new thing every week ie "no semi colons in the text", "must be less that 513 characters", "that photo is too wide/tall", "photos in the downloadable brochure must be the first 4 photos on the website", "no bullet points in the text"
I find it unbelievable that real estate agents cannot specify a data format that would avoid all of the above problems
3) Basic QA - ie checking that whats on a brochure is correct, following up to ensure that what was promised last week has actually been done - ie putting a card in the shop window, changing some text on a web site.
4) "Chinese whispers" - with our instructions being relayed from our primary contact and being changed slightly until whats finally put in the shop window by "the boys/girls out the back" is nothing like what was discussed or given to the agent.
I wont rant on any further. Believe me I could. Very similar experiences with 2 different companies. I won't name them.
So has anybody had any positive experiences with presenting their house themselves ?
Google reveals various companies that will allow me to use their editing facilities and graphics packages to get the house listed on realestate.com - is there anybody who has used them that could comment on them please ? Do the same broad problems listed above still occur ?
Any recommended reading or recommended web pages for DIY sell your house ?