Want to sell your house? Try setting up a home page

Typically, a 'traditional' estate agent's commission is between 1 per cent and 2.5 per cent, and on average sellers pay them £4,151 (based on a 1.9 per cent commission and the average cost of a UK house of £218,479). These fees are greatly undercut by two types of online competitor. First, the private-sales sites (such as houseweb.co.uk, mypropertyforsale.co.uk, or thelittlehousecompany.co.uk) which start from £47 for a service that typically buys you an online advertisement, photo and description (Gumtree, which is effectively a general-purpose online noticeboard, is free for property ads.) Secondly, there are the online estate agents, which have a radically different commission structure to agents on the high street, such as halfapercent.com, which, as the name suggests, charges 0.5 per cent commission, and hatched.co.uk, which charges £398 for its most popular service.

Why do we bother with estate agents? 'If there is a shortage of property and a high demand, as long as you're fairly sensible, you are almost bound to attract interest in your own property,' admits Peter Bolton King, chief executive of the National Association of Estate Agents. 'But even in a good market, if somebody is selling privately, will they be able to do as good a job as a good-quality estate agent? Will they be able to negotiate the best price? Can they really check out all the buyers' credentials? Can they try and help control the chain?'

These are issues regardless of the state of the property market, Bolton King says. 'When you get these tougher markets, as we did in the early 1990s, then the good-quality estate agents really show what they are made of,' he insists.

Selling your home is often about online visibility - eight out of 10 would-be buyers start property searches on the web, not on the high street. One limitation to going down the do-it-yourself route is that the private-sale sites generally don't have access to the big online 'property portals' that aggregate estate agents' sales listings (although online estate agents do). The biggest portal, rightmove.co.uk, reckons to list some 950,000 UK properties.

This lack of access has been the subject of some bitterness and dispute: Martin Charlick of Thelittlehouse

company complains that the portals are being 'downright restrictive,' whereas Rightmove insists that its policy is to accept advertising only from estate agents 'whose property descriptions are subject to the requirements of the Property Misdescriptions Act 1991'.

Its spokesman added: 'Our approach ensures that our users are given access to accurate property details. This would be impossible to monitor if we were to accept advertising from private sellers.'

None the less, Charlick claims that Thelittlehousecompany's £135 package offers access to 500 sites and potentially 3 million visitors a month. And according to Trevor Gillham of fellow private-sale site Mypropertyforsale, 'not being able to advertise on Rightmove is not really a disadvantage. There is enough exposure of the website to reach all buyers looking for property.'

Treat it like a business

'The views are amazing. You sit on the balcony with a gin-and-tonic and look across to France and the lights of Boulogne and Calais,' says John Cotter, 46, who until recently was sales director for a private hotel chain. Now he is selling his four-bed Kent home and moving to Zurich with his girlfriend.

Cotter has gone the do-it-yourself route, setting up a website (www.temeraireheights.com) to sell his house. That G&T moment is artfully recreated on the site with a photograph of the view of the English Channel from his balcony.

'If I'd put the house on the market through an agent, I'd have paid about £25,000 in fees. If I can sell it without the agent, that's a plus,' says Cotter. 'A lot of estate agents haven't embraced new technology, the marketing and sales ideas of the 21st century, so I thought I'd treat my own house as a business and push it that way.'

The house, on the market at £995,000, had been with an estate agent, but that only prompted a couple of expressions of interest. The website, which cost £500 and took less than two days to organise, is being supported by a viral email campaign to City businesses. So far the site alone has led to two viewings, plus an approach from an upmarket London-based estate agent to market the property ('they normally won't look at anything under £2.5m').

'It's generated more interest than the estate agent managed in two months,' he adds. 'A lot of people told me I'd never sell in this market and that has fired me up. Estate agents always sell houses, but why can't we do it ourselves?'

guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008