property company /property auctions

[sisi]

Does anyone have any experience of selling a property to a property company such as National Homebuyers or by auction? Having been let down by prospective purchasers we are now wondering whether this might be a quicker, less stressful solution. What percentage of the value of the property do these property companies offer or auctions  acheive? Does anyone have any experiences - good or bad, that they would care to share with us?

Thanks, Sisi

[parkesquay]

Sisi,This is exactly the question I want to ask but am new to this site. As far as I can see you have not had any replies to the question. Please confirm.

Regards,Parkesquay

[sisi]

Hello parkesquay, disappointingly I didn't receive any comments. I did however contact a couple of these companies to see what we might get if we sold them our cottage, we were on the market for �345K and one co. offered �265K, the other required a survey to be done before committing themselves to a value, I wonder if this is where they make their money! Both companies will give you the option of staying in the property and renting it should you wish to, which quite appealed to us. Due to the imminent whelping of our greyhound we have now taken our house of the market and might have another go with a more enthusiastic agent next year (if there is one!) Be good to hear from you if you get any further information. Good luck

Sisi

[parkesquay]

Sisi, I know that this is a bit late in the day but if you use the Google search engine and search National Homebuyers' you will come up with(amongst others)'Guardian Unlimited/money/ask the experts... This basically says that you have to be prepared to accept an offer that is at least 10% below the property's value on the open market. And the offer could be a lot lower than that, as one disgruntled customer - who was featured on Radio 4's 'You and yours' programme - discovered. The offer he received from National Homebuyers was 35% below what he thought his property was worth. What really rankled, though was the fact that before he received his offer from National Homebuyers, he had had to pay a fee for a valuation to be done. And as he decided not to go ahead with the sale, he didn't get this back.

Hope this makes you feel better. Regards Parkesquay