Selling your house on the Internet: a review of House Network
Published: 6 March 2008
By MoneyhighStreet Staff 7 Comments
Updated: 23 February 2010
Internet based Estate Agents are starting to challenge the traditional ways in which we sell our homes. Is using an Internet only estate agent to sell your house a sensible choice? We review House Network to find out.
House Network is a qualified estate agent, even though it doesn't have the high street offices of the traditional agencies. It employs a small number of regional agents who visit properties and prepare the sales details according to legal requirements. Although it only operates on the Internet, House Network is a bona fide estate agent, unlike some other property websites which merely publish classified adverts.
Being an estate agent brings a massive benefit to House Network – the ability to advertise its stock of houses on RightMove. As most buyers use RightMove when looking to buy a property, this gives the sellers using House Network access to almost the same markets as traditional estate agents. Indeed one suspects that without RightMove, House Network would not have a viable business.
So why would someone trying to sell their house consider House Network instead of a traditional estate agent? In a word, it is cost.
The costs of selling your home with House Network
As House Network is not renting expensive high street offices and paying for the expensive advertising in local newspapers, their charges are far lower than a locally based estate agent. The savings can be huge.
Although some traditional estate agents will only charge 0.5% plus VAT, most will charge you one percent or more, of the sales price, plus VAT. On a £300,000 home, this would cost £3,525.
House Network charges only a £395 plus VAT upfront fee to list the house on its web site and other portals such as Rightmove. There is no completion fee to pay with this price plan, although they have two other plans in which you pay lower up front fees, but then pay a completion fee once the house sale is successfully transacted (£295 + £295 or £195 upfront + £595 completion fee – all prices exclusive of VAT). So the sale of a £300,000 house would only cost a total of £424.63 – a saving of £3100.37!
As House Network charges fixed fees, irrespective of the sale price of your house, even a million pound house would only cost £424.63 to sell via the House Network. You read that correctly – the savings in estate agents fee can be huge.
What you get with House Network
When you sign up with the House Network website, you pay the £199 + VAT fee and then supply some brief details about your home. These will form the basis of your property description, although they have to be approved by their estate agents. You can also order a reasonably priced Home Information Pack at the same time.
You will soon be contacted by The House Network to arrange a visit from their regional agent and an energy assessor, if you have ordered a HIP through them.
The agent will spend a considerable time measuring your house, taking extensive photos, and preparing floor plans. He will also create three or four virtual tours of your house and supply optional extras such as 3d plans, if you have ordered these items. You will find this visit to be very thorough.
Within about 24 hours, the agent will have uploaded all your house details to the House Network website and provided you with an administrative area on their site so that you can view, or change, your details, particularly the photos that will be displayed in your property details.
You will also be sent a comprehensive HomeTrak property report that will help you decide on the best price to market your property.
House Network staff are available both by phone and Internet based chat to answer your questions and resolve problems or changes that you may have before your marketing goes live. You control the point at which your property starts to be marketed and displayed on portals such as RightMove and PropertyFinder.com.
Should a prospective buyer want to view your house, they will contact the House Network, who will then liaise with you to arrange a mutually convenient time for the viewing. An important point to note is that you show the prospective buyer around your property. House Network merely make appointments on your behalf and leaves the selling of the property to you.
What you do not get with House Network
For a minimal cost, you can actually receive many benefits from using House Network to sell your house, however there are some disadvantages that may out-weigh the costs saving, depending on your circumstances:
- House Network is not a local estate agent and therefore does not have good knowledge about the property market in your area.
- House Network does not perform the viewings so you have to be available, and willing, to show people around your home. This could be daunting, or difficult for many sellers.
- Your property will not be advertised in your local newspapers, which still attract attention, although property portals on the Internet are the main source of research for buyers.
- House Network does not hold a list of buyers who may have seen another property and might be interested in your house.
- The House Network will not mail out your details to a mailing list of registered buyers or pro-actively phone people who might be interested in your house.
Advantages and disadvantages
So as we have seen, there are some disadvantages to using House Network to market your house. Whether these are sufficient to persuade you that a traditional estate agent should sell your home, will depend on your personal circumstances.
Should you decide, however, that you will probably sell your house through RightMove anyway, and you don't mind showing prospective buyers around, then you will be rewarded with saving large estate agents fees, running into thousands of pounds.
In future article we will assess how successful House Network is in selling a house.
Updated: 23rd February 2010: We are pleased to report that House Network has now sold over 3000 properties in the six years of it’s operation.
article needs a revisit, would be nice to have some customerinput buyers/sellers
My brother and I both used house network to sell our properties which were sold for asking price to the first people to view, and yes they were both priced correctly as local agents valued them.
The traditional way that an estate agent calculates their fee based on a percentage of asking price is ludicrous as the costs associated of selling a 1 bedroom flat to a 16 bed mansion are very similar.
Also the average fee payable to an estate is not proportional to the costs they incur in selling your property.
I used PinkResidential.co.uk to sell my house and sold it already. They have been trading for ages near me but as Attrill a normal traditional estate agent. When I got them in to value and i mentioned I was thinking of selling myself they told me about the online part which is Pink and I was one of their first customers — I can’t recommend them enough I got an asking price offer but for me still go the comfort of going with a proper agent. Online is the way to go – so far so good and I haven’t had to do anything myself except show the people round but I knew who was coming and it was all booked in as normal.
We sold our house using House Network and sold at £15,000 more than what our local estate agent suggested. We also saved £1,500 against our local estate agents fees. Our house sold for £149,000 so we came out over 10% better off.
We used a promotion code found on the net and got 5% off HouseNetwork services including conveyancing.
I have just sold my house with House Network within a week of putting it on the market at the same price as similar houses locally that are still unsold. The cost was under £900 compared with an average of £4000 plus from conventional estate agents! I was pleasantly surprised to find that they also offer all the conveyancing on line – at a significantly lower cost than high street solicitors.
House search web sites
We had to show people round and put the House Network sign up on the front lawn – but I am sure we did a better job than a lot of estate agents as WE are the experts on every aspect of our house. The House Network make sure that a great set of photos get posted on all the important internet house search web sites within 48 hours and deal with all the calls and viewing appointments.
House Network discount code
As a satisfied customer I have been given a special referral number – when this is entered into the House Network shopping cart or confirmed to their sales team on the telephone they will give you a 5% discount on any order including any add on options. The code is XDFLXJLICK
I’ve just engaged the house network to sell our property – and so far they have responded very well indeed. The proof of the pudding, as they say, will be in the eating so we will see just how effective they prrove to be only when the property sells. My expectations are quite high though. I did get 5% off their advertised fees as well.
Here is a discount code that will give any customer 5% off – I think it has no expiry date – ZAHEFCOWOQ
Excellent value for money, highly recommended
Get a 5% discount using code OBGSQLAVCR.
We used House Network to sell our 2 bed Victorian terrace. They are basically the same as any other estate agent, except they are based totally online and don’t do viewings, you show viewers around yourself.
We put the house on the market in early May 2011, and accepted an offer at the end of July. We had around 16 viewings in all, a huge amount of interest for the house – even in a falling market. Despite the viewings, offers were thin on the ground as property prices had started to fall, and so we decided to be realistic within a very poor market and drop our asking price down slightly. This had the desired effect and we got our offer, allowing us to move on (as the houses we were looking to buy had also dropped in price slightly).
House Network offers amazing value for money – why pay thousands more than you need to just to use a local estate agent? They tell you that they have local knowledge and will advertise in your local newspaper, which House Network do not – but in reality, everyone looks online when they are searching for a property these days. House Network are on every major online property porthole you can think of – you will get the exposure you need, despite what local agents tell you. We saved ourselves between £2500 – £3000 (depending on what local agent we’d picked). House Network took excellent photographs of our house (loads of them too!), did a great floor plan – virtual tour – and all included in a pretty cheap basic package.
I liked the control that an online system such as House Network gives. I was able to add additional images if I wanted to, change the image order, tweak (or even totally write) the description used. For me, this was a huge plus. I also had Rightmove stats sent to me and so could tell how popular my property was. This system would not suit everyone, but if you are used to doing things online then this is for you.
I was a little nervous about showing people around at first, but in the end we found doing our own viewings was a good thing. People love to meet the owner, as they know that their questions can be answered quickly and accurately.
House Network are brilliant for being super efficient with admin too, the viewing booking process is great and they are very good at following up viewings to get feedback.
Overall, I thought House Network offered fantastic value for money and would highly recommend them. If you are willing to be a bit more involved in your house sale (input for promotional material, do your own viewings) then the rewards are well worth it.
If you want to give them a go you can use this discount code to get 5% off OBGSQLAVCR. It should work on top of any special offer they have on the website – did for us.