Reservethathouse.com allows a client to express an interest in a house even before it’s on the market, while putting his or her home up for bids. Will it mean the end of estate agents? asks Graham Norwood
To paraphrase John Lennon, imagine there’s no estate agency – in front of us, only homes. And while you are about it, imagine there is no need to wait until a homeowner puts his or her house on the market to start attracting potential buyers.
This is the vision of the six entrepreneurs behind Reservethathouse.com, a new website whose director, Dave Warriner, says is “not anti-estate agent, just pro-people”. He unashamedly says that his new creation is trying to do for house purchasing what Friends Reunited has done for school reunions.
The site works like this:
Phase one is free. You think of a property or street that you want to live in – really want to live in. You register your own home on the site, and then list the name, number and postcode of the house of your dreams. Over time you can see if anyone has shown an interest in wanting your own property – although you know only that there has been an expression of interest, not individual names or contact details.
Phase two costs just £5. This allows you to have contact details of people wanting your home and also allows you to send one pro-forma letter, written and posted by Reservethathouse.com, to the owner of the house you have your eye on. If you want to contact owners of more than one property, subsequent letters cost £2.50 a shot.
If anyone expresses an interest in your own home after you have registered, you receive an e-mail and therefore find out without having to check back with the site.
And that is it. Simple and, according to some estate agents, naïve and useless.
But think again. In the first 18 weeks since the site started in April, more than 1,000 new users registered each week. Until early September the conversion rate – the proportion of registered users who sent one or more letters to existing homeowners – was around 20%. But after a lengthy story about the site on Steve Wright’s Radio 2 show, registrations have rocketed and the conversion rate is up to 30%.
A council worker in Nottingham has mailed the owners of all but one of the houses in a whole street in the city. Another person has contacted the owners of over 30 homes on the Isle of Arran.
Reservethathouse wants to change the way Britons view house buying and is employing populist measures that play on our desire to move to certain streets and localities because their reputation is high or the nearby schools are of a high standard.
“We’re very keen that people stick with professional advice all along the route, except for estate agents,” claims Warriner. “We advise people to get their own property valued by a chartered surveyor – don’t upset agents by getting them to do it and then not instructing them,” he says. “If people want to sell, they shouldn’t do their own conveyancing, but instead use solicitors.”
So what is wrong with estate agents?
“Well,” he hesitates, seeking the right euphemism. “We’re not trying to do what they do. They sell houses that people want to sell. We’re trying to help people buy the homes they want, even if the owners don’t want to sell at that moment.”
An option for the future
The letters sent to owners explain that someone likes their home and that even if there is no intention of selling now it might be worth keeping the contact details of the interested person and getting in touch in the future.
“If that eventually leads to a sale, then great. Frankly, it will save them paying 1.75% of the sale cost to an estate agent, so they’ll benefit,” he says.
Reservethathouse figures suggest around 5,000 letters have been sent to date – a modest start given the hectic nature of the residential sales market over the past six months. But Friendsreunited.co.uk, the site that puts old schoolmates and work colleagues back in touch, had only 3,000 people register in the first three months of its existence in the late 1990s and has gone on to become a global internet phenomenon spawning TV game shows and fly-on-the-wall reunion documentaries.
Reservethathouse carries banner advertisements for dating services and, although it is in contact with surveyors about promoting their services, it believes word of mouth and media coverage will make or break the site.
The site is operated by Warriner, managing director Warren Davies and four other new media personnel at Ignite, a graphics and web design business based in Lancashire. The firm says set-up costs are confidential but proudly declares the site to be “low cost”. Ignite used public opinion survey consultancy Marketeers, who questioned 3,000 homeowners about their views on the site and its philosophy before the launch in April.
“There’s never a shortage of stories about properties, and women in particular will be the focus of our publicity,” says Davies. “We’ll do guerrilla marketing, publicising case studies when people buy or sell as a result of the site and riding on any other stories about estate agents and the property market. We’re talking to papers, too, about working with their property sections,” he explains.
Most estate agents have had experiences of “cold contact” selling. James Bailey of the Pimlico office of Douglas & Gordon had a buyer interested in any unmodernised house in a particular street. Bailey contacted them, explained the circumstances and persuaded someone to sell.
The power of positive selling
Upmarket central London agents Farrar recently helped a buyer who had missed out on buying two flats he wanted to modernise and sell on – on each occasion he was beaten by another investor wanting to do the same thing.
“Knowing one of the flats had been sold as an investment, I put my business card through the door asking if the new owner might consider selling,” recalls Farrar agent James Pace. “The owner agreed, making himself a tidy profit of £40,000 in the process and avoided paying agent’s fees as I was acting for the buyer,” he says.
Vivien Wakefield of the Fulham branch of London agency Faron Sutaria helped a client compose a letter to residents in one street. The mailshot worked, finding a female owner willing to sell – and Wakefield is now helping her do a mailshot to three other streets nearby, hoping the same idea will work a second time.
But no estate agent out of the 20 contacted by EG felt this method could be regarded as more than a last resort. Most feel that it can potentially be intimidating and unsettling to home owners who do not want to sell, that it risks creating a free for all among potential buyers and that it could be a security problem if enthusiastic would-be buyers try to follow up an initial letter with a personal visit.
Ed Mead, a property writer for The Sunday Times and an agent at Douglas & Gordon, has had a similar experience with a client, but says that if the estate agent or individual can organise a mailshot directly, why should people go through a website anyway?
Reservethathouse is unrepentant. Dave Warriner says: “We don’t care about the property tradition. We just want to do what people want.”
