Most people in the UK looking to move house use the internet to find property for sale. So it makes sense to make sure your property is on the web if you want to sell it. If you are with a real estate agent, most will list your property on one of the major real estate portals. Yet more and more people, tired of paying thousands of pounds to estate agents who do little work, vote with their feet and decide to sell their house themselves.
There are over 100 websites in the UK where you can advertise your house for sale, ranging from a basic text listing to a full internet estate agent service. However, most will have a limit on how much information you can add and how many photos you can include. Often this will be much less information than in the details of an estate agent.
The answer is to create your own website to sell your house. You don’t have to be a huge computer expert, and you can do it all in one night, using this step-by-step plan.
Where can I host my website?
Maybe you have some free web space offered by your Internet Service Provider. Now is the time to use it!
If you know a little bit about web design, you’re in luck, as all you need is a very basic knowledge of HTML and you’re ready to make an effective web page. If not, you can use a word processing package like Microsoft Word that will convert a document to a web page.
If you don’t have web space, you can use the free web space offered by the most popular search engines, such as Lycos Tripod or Yahoo Geocities. Most will also have website builder packages, so you simply input the information into a template and you have an instant website.
Write a concise title for your page.
Write a sentence using as few words as possible that summarizes your property, eg ‘For Sale: 3-bedroom townhouse in London’. Use this as the title of your page.
Prepare your data
However you decide to create your web page, prepare your details beforehand using the word processing package. You can do this on your own time, it will check your spelling for you, and you won’t lose all your work if your browser crashes. Measure all of your rooms and provide measurements in both metric and imperial. Remember to add anything interesting or unusual about the house, especially about its location and mention if it is in the catchment area of a good school.
take your pictures
Use a digital camera to take your photos if possible. You can take prints and scan them, but there is always a loss of quality. Photograph the front of your house and all the best features, the best rooms, the best corner of the garden, the great view if you have one. Drinks a lot. Now choose only the best images and make the size of the images as small as possible. If your image manipulation software allows you to optimize for the web, do so, it makes a world of difference to download times.
put it all together
Now create your main web page. Use a simple layout with a pale background, dark text, and be careful with animated icons! You want people to look at your home, not be distracted by a garish design. You also want it to load fast, so just put the best picture of your front of house on this page. Add your written data. Put additional photos on separate pages, just a few on a page. Use informative links, eg ‘Click here for photos of our large mature garden’ is good, ‘more photos’ won’t invite many people to look.
Give them even more!
There are several websites that offer UK maps that you can link to. Help potential buyers find you easily by adding this to your page. If you know a bit about technical drawing, you can make your own floor plans and put them on the website; this would be a real bonus as they are still quite rare. Finally, if you’re a magician with a video camera, you could try making your own virtual tour.
Finally, add your contact details
Now include your phone number and an email address. You may want to use a free ‘disposable’ email address for this, because putting your email address out on the web will tend to attract spam. Alternatively, there are many websites that will produce a scrambled version of your email address that will work just fine but spammers cannot read.
Now all you need to do is upload your website. You can submit the website to search engines and don’t forget to include the website address (URL) with your emails, brochures, newspaper ads, on your ‘For Sale’ sign and link to it from FSBO websites.
