Tesco is running a trial of its new online home selling service through a joint venture with estate agent Spicerhaart.
The trial is currently running in Bristol, but is soon to extend into London, Manchester, Birmingham, Reading, York, Portsmouth, Crawley, Southampton, Kent  and Leeds.
iSold.com has chosen Bristol for its national launch, offering sellers a fantastic service and the opportunity to save thousands of pounds in estate agency fees. iSold.com has been set up by the UK’s largest independent estate agency group Spicerhaart in association with Tesco, combining the very best of local traditional estate agency with advanced technology.
iSold.com offers 3 packages to home sellers; iSold Essential £999 inc vat; iSold Premium £1,119 inc vat; and iSold Premium Plus £1,299 inc vat and “uses advanced technology packed with features to get you the best price for your home and make the sales process quicker and smoother.”
How It Works
Sellers register for a free online valuation before a valuer visits to confirm the price, take photos, measure the rooms and create property details. Customers will pay £299 upfront for marketing services and the additional £700 when iSold.com has successfully sold the property.
The marketing services include listing your home on the following property portals, amongst others:
- Rightmove
- Globrix
- Primelocation
- Zoopla
- FindAProperty.com
Savings
The savings that iSold.com promise on selling your home through them are shown below:
Hybrid
It looks as if Tesco are hoping that this estate agency “hybrid”, blending online services with proper estate agents, will help them to attack a market that they previously dabbled in, Tesco Property Market, which was short-lived due to problems with meeting current regulations.
about time…..more competition the better..unqualified and often uneducated estate agents offer no value for money..
Who is going to negotiate the deals?
1.5% of the sale price! I wouldn’t even bother getting out of my chair for that! 5% is what they charge in the US!
What do the public want. Cheap fees and no service from an estate agent with considerable experience. How much work will the vendor (seller) want to do. Do they want to check their buyers sale and backward chain of sales, check their own onward chain of sales, chase all the solicitors acting for everyone in this chain of sales, check their buyers finances, do all their own viewing on their property and vet each applicants. If so let them get on with it and come back to a good estate agent afterwards and then pay a reasonable commission fee after making a potential loss on abortive valuation, survey and solicitors fees.
Competition is good. Quality service is good, licenced estate agents with a licenced standard of service is good. Sort this out first please.
Tesco is good for basic value food shopping and land banking the next branch positions, i wonder how good they will be at gauging the value of your home and if you choose that yourself too then it may be sold in minutes or years, with the vendors doing the sales i guess they might appreciate the service of a good agent and the property ombudsman may be very busy in the near future.
If you turn this statement on its head:
Tesco is running a trial of its new online home selling service through a joint venture with estate agent Spicerhaart.
You could say:
Estate Agent Spicerhaart is running a trial of its new online home selling service through a joint venture with Tesco.
I think people are getting caught up making this a supermarket vs estate agent discussion to realise that the isold.com Joint Venture may actually offer customers something attarctive:
a professional on the ground to sell their house + full online coverage (Rightmove) + lower fees.
£999 to sell your property. I am an estate agent. we generally get a fee of 1.00-1.25%, which I gather is fairly commonplace at the moment, certainly in our area. Therefore, the fees that Tesco use to compare savings are very widely massaged and manipulated.
We work hard for our fee, keeping buyer and seller together and managing the process, and peoples expectations, not to mention emotions!
Isold will provide exactly what you are paying for! A cheap, no frills, disorgainsed, certralised, call-centre driven, zero local knowledge or experience, disjointed service.
Their reps will know nothing about the specifics of the area, the road, the property, the amenities! They will probably use someone like zoopla or equivalent to value a property, which the professionals within the industry know to be hugely inaccurate in most cases.
The “call centre” environment will be an utter disaster – you’ll never speak to the same person twice, no-one will ever get to know you, your property, your sale, your life!
It may take a while until the pitfalls that isold avoid telling you about come to light with the masses, but when it does, I fully expect it will drag the name of those involved with it deservedly through the mud for attempting to rape yet another professional industry of it standards and professionalism.
For those home sellers in need of saving a few quid, I wish you luck. You’re going to need it. For those who understand the importance of a relationship with a professional, local, experienced estate agent who will know your name, who will be your one point of contact throughout, and who will work with you at a very personal level to navigate the process of selling your home, then us professional estate agents look forward to continuing to working with you to make sure your home sale happens professionally and properly.
A hard working and pro-active local estate agent should have the capability to sell your property for the highest value possible in the market. What isold save you in fees will probably be lost several times over in lower selling prices due to lack of local knowledge and general service.
I quite agree with Matthew above – unfortunately the public have begun getting local expertise to value their property before completely ignoring their services and banging the property on Rightmove with companies such as isold and other ‘estate agents’ (who are really just private sale sites).
And I’m frankly surprised Rightmove etc allow these private sale sites (sorry…estate agents) to advertise with them.
Their own terms and conditions say you must be an estate agent offering estate agency services… To me, with 10 years in the industry, this implies offering local area knowledge, valuation advice, ability to deal with vacant properties, show people around, negotiate the sale, knowing your client’s needs etc etc.
The reality is Rightmove will let anyone advertise with the minimum of compliance and people will undoubtedly get bitten in the long run…
As for call centre service, will this be what it’s like?-
“Hello Mrs smith – what was your property reference number again? And which city are you in? I can’t seem to access your file… We’re having some technical difficulties”
Oh dear. I’m off to Morrisons to get some milk and ask them if they can sell my car.
I signed up to sell my property with isold in January this year. It took them SIX WEEKS to upload my house photo’s to their website, With NO communication as to what the delay was. They finally got my property live on their site (7 weeks late). I was told when having my valuation that they don’t do viewings, only open house etc. Today, I have had a phonecall from of the agents saying they wanted to do a viewing on my property.THEN, another agent rung me back to say they don’t do viewings, only open houses, so would have to tell the prospective buyer to wait approx 2-3 weeks til more interest is generated. I have my houses on the market with another estate agent who i have since accepted a sale on my property at a considerably lower price. If isold had bothered to do their work properly, my house would have been on the site on time etc and they would have had an open house long before now. Not once have i received a courtesy call from isold OR any information on the delays, except for a “lost PDA to upload the photo’s”. They are completely unprofessional, rude, incompetent and 100% useless to anyone who wants to sell a house. Possibly, hence the low agency fees. I guess you do get what you pay for! I would never ever recommend them to anyone and will be writing a formal letter of complaint to Tesco about it.
I agree with Natalka Mears. I have also signed up there and same problem i was facing there. there is no live support where we can go to tell our problem.
I would never use a website to sell my home!
Tesco are moving to Australia. can we expect them to try similar things here?