Auctioneer charges fixed fee to sell property with no hidden extras

Is the Fixed Price Model the Future of Auctioneering?

Irish property vendors are starting to vote with their wallets by choosing fixed price estate agency, Auctioneera, according to Eddie O’Driscoll, founder and director of the company.

Buoyed by a recent appearance on Joe Duffy’s Liveline, Mr O’Driscoll says “at one point, there were over 1,000 visitors on our website and it nearly crashed but we managed to keep it online and since then the phone just hasn’t stopped ringing!”

Traditionally when selling a property, the person selling the property (the vendor), will pay the auctioneer a percentage of the final selling price of the property, typically in the region of 1.5%+VAT.

This means that a property that sells for €300,000 would incur estate agency fees of €5,535.

As many estate agents charge marketing fees in addition to the percentage, the total figure could be approaching or in excess of €6,000. It does seem like quite a lot to pay for what does seem like a relatively straight forward job.

O’Driscoll is quick to point out that while selling a property is an extremely important task with hundreds of thousands of Euro at stake, the status quo fees are just “way too high”.

When you actually break down the costs of selling a property from the onsite valuation, the professional photography, floor plans, Daft / MyHome listings, For Sale sign and handling the offers, it comes to hundreds and not thousands of euro.

Originally, we had intended to help vendors sell their properties themselves by selling them the photography and For Sale signs for example but what we found is that people still want an expert to manage the whole process for them.

This is why every client is assigned a qualified estate agent to handle the entire process from start to finish, but for a reasonable fee.

With almost €6million worth of properties sold / sale agreed to date, O’Driscoll does seem to be striking a chord with Irish property vendors.

Of course, with long established and well entrenched incumbents firmly in place, he will have his work cut out if he is to unseat these agencies, many of which are household names.

However, it is a challenge he appears to be relishing.

He added: “We think many traditional agents grew too comfortable on the percentage-based model; there was almost a sense of entitlement to such high fees.

"We hope that we can shake things up and introduce some real competition to the marketplace.

"To date, we calculate that we have saved our clients over €76,000 and at the rate we are adding clients, €100,000 of savings will be achieved before much longer.”

Interesting times ahead in the property market it would appear – watch this space!