Finding a new home and arranging to move used to be an exhausting operation, which started off with trekking round estate agents and signing up to various mailing lists, and ended with making endless phone calls and writing streams of letters to sort out the legal work, arrange the insurance and switch the names on the utility bills.
Now the eBay generation, which banks online, orders groceries from the Tesco or Ocado websites and buys books from Amazon, is completely comfortable with buying and selling everything online – and houses are no exception.
IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group), an industry body for e-retail, predicts that by 2010 at least half of the homes sold in the UK will actually be sold without a traditional estate agent.
Even those who are not big users of the internet can benefit from researching many aspects of a house move online.
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Property research
No more driving off to a distant town and visiting surly estate agents in the rain, only to find they have nothing to offer or that the four-bedroom house with glorious views is actually two bedrooms, a boxroom and a rabbit hutch next to the gasworks. Now you can do your initial search online – just as 70 per cent of buyers now do.
A good place to start is a website such as Rightmove or Primelocation, which will give you a broad view of what’s on offer and what prices are like – and you might even turn up trumps straight away. Most estate agents now have their own sites. A new site called Zoomf.com is a special property search engine that trawls them for you.
Some of these ‘portal’ sites give you extra information on the area of your search, but if you need to get further information about local shops, services and schools, you can check them out on sites such as Upmystreet.com or the local authority’s website.
There is, of course, no substitute for visiting a property you are thinking of buying, but some of the more sophisticated sites actually offer a video tour of properties for sale, and you can certainly save a lot of shoe leather visiting totally unsuitable houses. Check out photos of the area, to look at things such as access to motorways, with Google Earth.
You can see what prices other houses in your area sold for at www.landregistry.gov.uk/houseprices and also at UpMyStreet.com
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Mortgages
The next job is getting your mortgage – and you should really have this in place before you start serious viewing, so you will be in a position to make an offer straight away and move quickly towards sale, so you are not gazumped.
There are lots of ways to research a mortgage online. You can look at the sites of individual banks and building societies, but to get a better idea of what is on the market you can use a search engine site such as Moneyfacts, Moneyextra or Moneysupermarket or the best-buys on our own site www.whatmortgage.co.uk. Then you can either apply direct to the lender whose deal you like the look of, or, in the case of Moneyextra or Moneysupermarket, ask to be contacted by a broker.
The lender or broker may be able to give you an instant offer in principle, before you have a proper valuation of your home, and if it uses an ‘automated valuation model’ (AVM) you may even get a firm offer. An AVM is a vast databank of property prices that can be used to correlate the size of the loan you want to your salary and the likely value of the house.
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Selling your home
If you go to a traditional estate agent, your home will probably end up online on a site such as Rightmove, where you may already have found the house you want to move to.
Estate agent Wow Property will sell your home for a flat fee of just £899, including VAT, by promoting it on the Rightmove, Fish4Homes, Propertyfinder, Look4a Property FindaProperty, HotProperty and ThinkProperty sites.
Nick Wright, managing director of Wow, says: Easyjet and IKEA have proved that it’s possible to provide great products and services at a fraction of the cost, and our aim is to revolutionise the property market in the same way. The commission-based model is no longer viable – you’re charged on the basis of the value of your house rather than the amount of work taken to sell it. It’s essentially like a beggar demanding 3 per cent of what’s in your wallet.
You could also try cutting out the estate agent altogether and putting your house on an online sales site,such as www.thehouseladder.co.uk or www.housenetwork.co.uk. The latter can cost as little as £500, no matter what the value of your home.
If you sell online you will usually buy a particular ‘package’, with different levels of service. One of the things you should definitely consider is a package that includes a For Sale board to put outside the house, referring potential buyers to the site where you have your property listed for more details, or giving a phone number to ring. This should find drive-by buyers and the minority who do not usually use the internet.
Another popular online sales site is www.thelittlehousecompany.co.uk, which can give the private seller access to the main commercial sales websites. A Little House Company spokesman says: The well-known major property websites where agents advertise their homes don’t accept advertising from homeowners direct. You have to go through a commercial subscriber, but this doesn’t have to be an agent.
The Little House Company is one of the few professional private marketing services for homeowners where online advertising on the same sites that agents use can be purchased at very low cost – typically a one-off charge of £100-£150 for unlimited property advertising on over 550 websites – until sold.
People who have followed the online route have vastly different opinions of whether it is a good idea. Those for whom it has worked – usually in a fast-moving market in areas where properties are all of a similar type – are highly enthusiastic, and delighted that they have saved many thousands of pounds in estate agents’ commission. However, if your house is unusual, you are not sure of the true value or it needs special marketing, you would probably be better off using a high street estate agent.
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Home Information Packs
At the time of writing, the future of Home Information Packs (HIPs) is unclear. At present, anyone selling a home with four bedrooms or more after August 1 will need to have at least commissioned a HIP by the time they put the property on the market, in order to be able to show it to a prospective buyer.
You will be able to get a HIP from a number of sources. Your estate agent may offer one, if you are using an agent, or will be able to refer you to a provider. Or you can get your own. Once again, an internet search engine will turn up any number of providers, such as www.hipsdirect.com
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E-conveyancing
If your transaction is reasonably uncomplicated it is possible to do the conveyancing yourself. However, most people prefer to use a solicitor or conveyancing service, and you can easily locate one online. If you put the words online conveyancing into a search engine you will find plenty of firms who can do the work for you, and give you peace of mind because of the professional guarantees they provide.
Moneyextra offers an online conveyancing service, as does Yorkshire Building Society. With Yorkshires service you dont even need to have your mortgage with the society, which guarantees that, if any of the listed firms quote a cheaper price direct, it will undercut the quote by £50.
The Land Registry has launched a chain matrix service, which allows conveyancers, their clients and estate agents to view the progress of property transactions in chains on a dedicated website.
John Blake, technical development and conveyancing manager at participating legal firm Coffin Mew & Clover in Portsmouth, says: We will be able to update details of the progress
of the transactions in the matrix, and leave messages for other participants in the chain. This should benefit our clients, as we will be able to resolve any issues as they arise more quickly.ï¶
Finally, you will need to arrange various insurances. You will need buildings and contents insurance for your new home. You may also need mortgage payment protection insurance (MPPI). This may either be payment protection insurance (to cover the loan) or income payment protection insurance, also called short-term income protection, to ensure that payments continue to be made to your lender if you can’t work for reasons of accident, sickness or unemployment. If you want MPPI – and not everyone does – don’t necessarily take the policy offered by your lender. Shop around.
Pam Needham, director of AntInsurance, says: The internet is the perfect place to shop around, and you will find many stand-alone providers that offer vastly cheaper cover, and with choice and flexibility to suit the buyer.
She adds: Aggregator sites are a good place to start looking, particularly if you want to get a feel for what is on the market. However, be warned: sites like Moneysupermarket only list companies that have paid them a commission or a fee. They do not necessarily represent the very best deals on the market.
Always read the policy document, and make sure it is right for you. Remember to choose cover appropriate to your needs. For example, do you have sufficient savings to tide you over for short periods of unemployment, or do you have generous company benefits? If you need only a small amount of cover, or could delay making a claim, you may be able to buy a policy more cheaply.
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Chain matrix box
The Land Registry has launched a ‘chain matrix’ service, which allows conveyancers, their clients and estate agents to view the progress of property transactions in chains on a dedicated website.
John Blake, technical development and conveyancing manager at participating legal firm Coffin Mew & Clover in Portsmouth, says: We will be able to update details of the progress of the transactions in the matrix, and leave messages for other participants in the chain. This should benefit our clients, as we will be able to resolve any issues as they arise more quickly.
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