The sale was fairly pain free.

We visited Greece for a fortnight and were lucky enough to find a lovely villa for long term rent and so we were able to organise the international removers to come and collect the items we were taking with us and give them an address for delivery in Greece.

We are now living happily in Greece, awaiting the delivery of our new Catamaran for us to use to enjoy the many sparkling beaches that are all around us.

The food here is amazing, we eat fruit and vegetables only minutes after they have been picked or harvested and the inexpensive 'everyday' fish and meat is so superior to the expensive stuff that we used to pay through the nose for in the UK that every meal time is a real pleasure.

I have rediscovered my love of cooking, and yet we are all losing weight

Virtually no crime, a friendly respectful population and a much lower cost of living.

I think that this is as close to happy ending as is realistic possible.

Conclusions:

We sold through a local estate agent who knew the buying public and knew someone who was interested in our property.

Selling via the internet alone is probably best done if you have a 'lower end' of the market property suitable for first time buyers or investment purchasers.

We didn't get any enquiries from any of the internet options such as gumtree, vivastreet or monkeymove.

If people are selling due to financial difficulties (which we weren't) then selling to one of those companies that buy the house and rent it back to you is an interesting option that should not be rejected out of hand.

Spending money on an advert in local newspapers or local papers' property websites is a waste of time when you are selling a property.

If you are clear as to wanting to sell and move, be ready to take an offer - in the long run it is much better to be free of a property than dragged down by worries and expenses and mortgage payments on a building you no longer want and which may be holding you back from a better life elsewhere.

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We have dropped the price of our house in Swansea from £269,995 to £249,500 for a quick sale!!!

Here are the rooms
1. the sitting room with a concealed cinema screen, plaster coving and picture rail and double glazed double bay windows.

2. Dining room in 4 bedroom house for sale in Swansea

3. Study  11'4 x 9'0 (3.45m x 2.74m )  (no picture)

4. Modern fitted kitchen with dishwasher, american style fridge freezer, 2.5 bowl stainless steel sink units, multi media unit with MP3, DVD player, Digital and FM radio, and digital tv.

5. Conservatory / breakfast room

I will post the garden and upstairs tomorrow.

We have been offered £240,000 as a cash purchase but they are only the second people who have viewed.  We are going to see if there are any better offers over the next ten days or so.

The website is http://www.stjohnshouse.info

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'For Sale' board went up at last.

It is very eye catching. A double sided board and positioned to be seen whichever end of the road a car or pedestrian might be travelling.

There is a very cute little monkey on it which has already caused a bit of comment and apparantly a few brochures have already been requested from the agents - so hopefully things are starting to happen.

We are just waiting for Carl our chippy to pop along and put the finishing touches on our brand new utility room and cloakroom.

It's looking extremely good. I have gone for a slightly Japanese feel to those rooms as they lead out onto the garden and I have a bamboo and zen 'thing' going on out there.

The conservatory, kitchen and the utility and cloakroom are all seemlessly blending into an 'outdoor indoor' type mish mash.

The loo has turned out to be a very pleasant place to be. Very clean and calm and relaxing.

I am convinced that anyone who actually steps over the threshold of the house is going to fall in love immediately with it now. There is such a serene atmosphere and the lovely thick walls are keeping the house nice and cool despite the fairly humid day we are having today.

I remember when I lived in Barratt detached house - in the hot weather it was murder, as the walls were just not thick enough to provide much insulation from the heat so if a front room got warm then the rooms next to it would as well and the windows didn't generate any air flow even when they were open.

No problems like that in this house. The sash windows we installed are amazing! If you open the top and the bottom of just one window in one room, the hot air leaves through the top gap and pulls in cool air through the bottom - which causes a nice little air flow all on its own.

It is nice to sit near the window and just enjoy the breeze.

Some lucky person is going to have a wonderful house to enjoy and we can be proud to pass it on to them and enjoy our new life in Greece knowing we did a good job here.

I am a great believer in Karma.

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We have nearly finished decorating the loo, and the utility room is next. The paper we chose has turned out to be even nicer than I thought it would be.

If we weren't going to live in Greece and have adventures and go sailing etc, I would be feeling very sad  to be selling this house. It is soo gorgeous now. If only we could have afforded to do it up when we first moved in so we could have had more time living in it while it is so nice.

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  Spooky or what?

We have started today though and I confidently predict we will be done by Wednesday afternoon.

We decided to put our house on the market with MonkeyMove and see how it goes for about four weeks and then re-evaluate the situation.

We are supposed to get our 'For Sale' board in Three days time and in the meantime I have changed the phone numbers on the vivastreet and gumtree adverts to direct to the agents instead of us.

Assuming my psychic powers hold up we will be able to photograph the newly decorated utility room and downstairs loo for the house website.

Get back to you soon,

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All those little jobs that need finishing in order to bring the house up a notch from fantastic to perfect.

I have a few light switches to change from nasty white plastic ones to matching gold and brass effect ones.

Then we will be rubbing down the banisters and repainting them.

We made the mistake of having carpet laid too soon after painting them and they were chipped and rubbed in places. I wasn't happy with the finish the decorator left on the handrail anyway - I want it glassy and smooth and it is anything but and it is currently a dirt magnet.

I have bought some gorgeous deep brown paint in extra high gloss and will be finishing the handrail and tops of the main pillars (or whatever they are called) on the banisters so that they are shiny an chocolatey. That is more in keeping with the Edwardian period anyway than white. They were a nasty pine before, which is nice if you are going for the country farmhouse look, but this house is much more 'elegant townhouse' and deserves to be decorated accordingly.

We will also be finishing off the decorating in the utility room and downstairs loo, and painting the smallest bedroom.

OK I doubt we'll get it all finished this weekend but we should get a fair amount fo it done at least.

I will get some before and after pictures done as well for the blog.

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I am quite impressed so far. After yesterday with the typical 'suits' from estate agents (one of whom was quite nice all the same) with their extremely expensive 'services' this was refreshing.

Glenn was friendly but not at all pushy, and talked us through what they do and what they don't do.

It is quite a new concept in estate agency - ie not a rip-off and he (and the lady I spoke to on the phone) comes across as a really genuine person rather than an 'estate agent'.

I think we may well give this a try and see how it works out. But we have a weekend to discuss and fight over it. I think my usual sheet of paper with pros and cons for standard estate agent versus Monkey Move versus private selling and then make our choices on the result.

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One of them insists on 1.5% commission and an exclusive 12 weeks sole agency contract and tried to persuade us to sell the property at quite a low price.

The other one is prepared to go for an 8 week sole agency contract and give us a discount on their 1.25% commission. They also have a very solid internet presence and have an excellent knowledge of the local market. I also think it is telling that they are the agents that all the other agents have bad mouthed, and that they appear to have all the 'up market' properties on their books in comparison with the other agents.

Tomorrow we have the MonkeyMove lady coming round so we will see how she measures up to the competition.

The last time we sold a house we lived in the South of England and it was easy choosing an agent because we had had dealings with most of them as tenants before we eventually bought a home and had a good idea who we could trust to be working in our best interests. Here is trickier.

I know we will get through this and everything will work out but it is hard work and I get very befuddled by it all. The wrong decision could cost us thousands and we just can't afford to lose that kind of money.

Still I know in the scheme of things we are very lucky overall and so I must try to keep some sort of perspective. But I am one of life's worriers - which makes me anxious - hah!!

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If only I didn't get bored and irritated so easily.

I know that my adverts have only been online for 1 whole day but in my deepest hidden subconscious I was expecting gazillions of people to have contacted us by now offering to buy our beautiful house.

No wonder I get disappointed so much.  Other people's definitions of unrealistic expectations are my plans aims and objectives.

Any way, I have been further researching alternatives to the 'standard' estate agent.

In my area there is a 'new' type of estate agent in operation called Monkey Move  and I have had a little look at what they offer and have invited them round for a chat on Friday morning.

The first and obviously eye grabbing thing about them is that they only charge .5% - that is 1/2% for their services.

Which if you get a sale from them is a considerable saving.

They field phone calls, advertise your property on all the 'biggy' property websites such as RightMove etc and organise viewings at mutually convenient times for viewers and sellers.  They also provide a For Sale sign with a rather cute looking Monkey logo on it.

What they don't do is advertise individual properties in local papers, or conduct viewings themselves.

But they have a sole agency agreement lasting 12 weeks and that's a long time to get tied in if it isn't generating viewings.

So if anyone is reading this I would appreciate some feedback as to whether or not you would be more likely to look for a house to purchase online or in the newspaper.

Let me know via the comments section.

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NO 

So not best pleased about that.  However she has passed info along to the advert people to ask them to be a bit more creative about their offerings.  I shan't hold my breath.  She has told me that she only does editorial about houses being offered by agents who advertise on their advertising pages.

Its strange because I have always been told when on marketing courses that editorial was never linked to advertising and that if one suggested that advertising would be attendent following or associated with an editorial that journos would get all huffy and offended.

Obviously that ship sailed long ago...

I have asked her to give me odds on getting an editorial on the property if we put the house with an agent that advertises with them.

Those old stress levels are rising...  not so slowly and very surely.

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I run my own business in my 'real' life outside the hurly burly of trying to flog our 4 bed house in Swansea and am trying to apply the lessons I have learned to this particular project.

First of all examining the options on printed media to a person advertising a quality property such as ours.

There are two major players in the local paper arena.

There is the Thisis bunch (run by Northcliffe media and the IC network bunch run by the Mirror group.

Both allow adverts to be placed online - but both only offer extremely meagre "property for sale by owner" advertising opportunities of the boxed classified advert type and obviously as they are DIY packages they are fairly limited in their scope.

As I am interested in getting a more upmarket type advert organised I decided to call the papers and try and speak to a 'real' person.

Thisis fell at the first fence. The first number to classifieds found me speaking to a lady who had no idea about anything other than classifieds tried to pass on the call and cut us off. The second number tried was for the Property Desk and was unobtainable. The third number found the Property desk via calling Display Advertising which was then redirected to an answer phone - an hour later and no call back forthcoming.

IC network were a little better. I called the contact us number from the online advert placement page. I left my number with a call handler and received a call back within 35 minutes.

The person I spoke to offered me a better package (slightly more money) than the online package and then passed me back to the call handling system saying I needed to speak to Editorial.

I was then transferred to Editorial and redirected to the lady who deals with the editorial for the property pages.
She was very disparaging and said she only deals with agents because they advertise on the property pages.

I was getting a bit irritated by now - so I said 'Even if the property is extremely newsworthy, you don't want to even consider it?'

I then explained why I thought our house was an interesting example of the Edwardian period having lots of original features and having an interesting local history associated with it.

I also said that we were selling the website associated with it and also mentioned that we had a reasonable marketing budget and I was surprised that I had money to spend and apparantly no takers.

She changed her tone after that, took the website address and my phone number and said she'd get back to me.

The phone rang about ten minutes later and it was she, asking for my email address.

So maybe there is hope after all.

Frankly, there is a strange attitude in the property market whereby the agents and papers seem to think they are doing you a favour just breathing in your direction - they don't seem to want to actually do any work or anything drastic like that

So marks out of ten so far

Thisis - zero out of ten

IcNetwork - 6 out of ten

Ever get the feeling someone was trying to tell you something you didn't want to hear?

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So far we haven't been.

We have another couple coming round in a few days so hopefully one of them might 'gel'.

We have spent so much time and money in getting the house 'right' for showing and I just want an agent that will be enthusiastic and motivated without being pushy.

I don't mind paying for a service - but it should be that - a service.

One estate agent even got the basic details of our property wrong by listing too few downstairs rooms and missing out a pile of important things, like we have a walk in pantry, an entrance room big enough for a waiting room (they didn't even mention it existed), left out our lovely conservatory

and took photos of the interior without the lights on and while we were still in the process of decorating.

They said 'don't worry the pictures will look fine' - the pictures looked terrible.

We then found out the estate agents were describing themselves as members of the NAEA when they were not members - which is an offence.

It was that experience that prompted me to do our own website for the house so that when we decided it was ready to put it on the market at least people could see it properly.

I am going to start linking the website to established websites today to see if that will help.

I will also contact the local papers to find out how much it costs to place advertisements in the property pages ourselves.

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But the Vivastreet one had all the pictures stripped out of it and they have added strange looking links from individual words to adverts for all sorts of unrelated things

I added the pictures again this time using their browser/download instead of html code and they are up now, but not where they should have been and the adverts are still in there

Here's the Vivastreet advert

So Gumtree had the advert online faster, it was easier to set up less complicated overall and it doesn't have annoying adverts all over it.

So so far Gumtree 9.5 out of 10 and Vivastreet 6 out of 10

Now all we have to see if we get any responses, to see if Vivastreet can redeem itself that way.

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I just added our details to two classified online websites.

I searched for "House for Sale Swansea" on Google

I got this result page

and found the first websites that would allow me to add my advert to their pages.

vivastreet was the first one

gumtree was the second one

I filled in Gumtree and Vivastreet and submitted the adverts. It was quite easy to do but Gumtree was the most user friendly by far. It was also the quickest as my advert is already online, but I am still waiting for vivastreet.

I will let you know when the vivastreet one gets online.

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Just finished putting together a website for our house to try and market it ourselves online.

We have been planning to sell for a year or so, but we have been 'refurbishing' and improving the house and didn't want to put it on the market until we had finished.

Unfortunately the recent nonsense with the HIPS packages has meant that just as we are genuinely ready to sell - a whole lot of other speculative sellers have flooded the market.

Which means according to the estate agents we have spoken to that a lot of the houses on the market are not really committed to selling, they are just seeing whether someone will make them an offer they can't refuse or not.

We have no chain and have decided to pay the stamp duty for the people who successfully offer for our house as a way to show to purchasers that we are serious about selling.

We are emigrating to Greece for the weather and the sailing. We will be renting over there and so we are flexible about timescales.

Here's the link to our website http://www.stjohnshouse.info- let me know what you think - any tips about how to market would be gratefully received - but no agents or other folk trying to sell us services please.

I'll keep posting about how we are doing as far as what I do to promote the website and what sort of results we get.

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

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