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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Pity the word “stunning”: battered beyond recognition in property listings copy. Likewise “luxury”: misappropriated as a synonym for bling.
Clichéd sales listings weren’t the only reason I — a writer and editor — decided to circumvent agents and DIY the recent sale of my London flat, but they certainly helped. True, I have a sensitivity towards language, but I can’t be the only one who scours Rightmove perturbed by the hackneyed descriptions. It actively puts me off buying a property. When it comes to the photos, here, too, I was disinclined to draw upon the conventional sales armoury. The light-drenched images often resemble a crime scene.
But the strongest motivation for flogging my own flat was — we are talking property here — pecuniary. The UK’s brutally spiking interest rates of recent years had suddenly made my decision to hang on to one London pad while moving into a larger one seem like a fevered, Trumpian dream. One had to go, and the question was whether I wanted to sacrifice a good whack — just shy of £10,000 — of the already imperilled asking price for the services of an agent.
If we can market our own preloved goods on sales and auction platforms and our very selves on dating apps, then surely we can sell our own houses. In the UK, there are a number of platforms on which to do this.
There are several persuading factors. Not least the current climate when it comes to selling a flat. FT analysis of recent Land Registry data showed prices for a flat have underperformed the rest of the market in every region, and in the capital have barely changed since 2019. All the more reason to keep a bigger slice of the pie.
Another motivating factor: many of us are now working from home. Yes, you can be your own estate agent because you’re always on site for viewings. Or, to look at it another way, if you do work from home and you decide to sell that home yourself, you don’t have to skedaddle every time the besuited agent turns up with a potential buyer.
Moreover, you know your own joint. Few can convey that intimacy better than you — just as long as you temper it with a little attempted mind-reading. This last trick seems essential: I started to get second viewings of my mid-century flat when I trumpeted the features that I guessed would turn my buyers’ crank (the ornament-is-crime neutrality, the giddily bountiful light) and dialled back my enthusiasm for, say, the original 1950s rubbish chute.
So, decision made, on to the listing. Here, our digital literacy comes into its own. I have a digital camera with interchangeable lenses but, by carefully controlling the scene, you can create compelling images with just a mobile. A crucial ingredient here is a tripod, not only to avoid blur but also to allow for long exposures that minimise the need for harsh flash.
When it comes to the subject, property photography invariably avoids “clutter” — namely, reminders of you. Not only are people, in a weird, Stalinesque manner, airbrushed out of real estate pictures, but you are supposed to exclude anything that will interrupt someone fantasising about occupying the property instead of its current inhabitant.
That maxim is tested when the person showing them around the property is its current inhabitant. Here, I found a degree of self-abnegation invaluable. I tried to convey that I wasn’t in any meaningful sense the proprietor. They were; I was merely passing through.
And so to the write-up. Since when did it become de rigueur to string together a few stock phrases and half-truths? Yet I noticed a tendency in other DIY agents (detectable by the DIY-agency logos on their adverts) of actually emulating bombastic estate agency speak. Don’t do that; you are compromising your advantage.
I get that the salesman shtick is meant to distract from the unexceptional nature of the places most of us live in but, to paraphrase the Vice magazine co-founder Shane Smith, the only way to circumvent people’s marketing bullshit-detector these days is not to bullshit them. Agency The Modern House offers a sober yet evocative listings style worth cribbing; Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward possess a restrained tone that Hemingway might have admired if looking to move somewhere conveniently located for bars.
If you go for a bare-bones offering from one of the DIY real estate platforms — such as Strike, which I used, where you provide the pictures and the copy, resisting add-ons like hosted viewings — you’re only looking at a few hundred pounds. Legal matters are the same as a conventional sale: the solicitors take over to wrangle the details.
The problem arises after viewings — when you are at risk of being wounded by comments about your home and personal taste. One such I received from the just-retired couple in sensible shoes — in fact, sensible everything — left cold by my raw brass bathroom fittings, bespoke plywood kitchen and De Stijl-ish tiles. They said they would have put in an offer — had it not been for the decor.
The sympathique pair who did follow through on their offer a few months in, at pretty much the height of post-Truss property pessimism, saved me enough in agency commission to salve such wounds nicely, thank you very much.
No doubt, if it loses the suits and the waffle, high street estate agency can reinvent itself for a more cynical, discerning age. But, in the meantime, when it comes to selling a property you’ve grown out of, why not just do it yourself?
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