A property owner is marketing his house on Facebook and offering £1,000 for the ‘share’ that sells it.
Josh Hocking, 22, claims that he is fed up with estate agents after receiving only two offers in four months.
Hocking bought the two-bed semi in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, last December and has spent £60,000 on renovating it.
It is now up for sale for £190,000 and Hocking says he will hold out for the price.
Hocking says he got the idea after having previously put an apartment up for rent on Facebook.
He says he believes Facebook could be the ideal platform for selling a property as it lets sellers and potential buyers directly contact each other.
His latest Facebook post has gone viral, and when we last looked had been shared over 79,000 times.
Comments (24)
I’ve had a great idea I’ll start up a website to sell houses i’ll call it propertybook.com or propertyface.co.uk I thinks it’s the right move in today’s digital market place, don’t you?
Going forward, if all sellers did this it would be like looking on eMoovs website without a search function enabling you to filter the results…… And the occasional FB chav feeling like they have won the lottery with a thousand pound in their back pocket.
The comments on this article are all missing the point.
Regardless of what your agency agreement says, what *legislative guidelines* have been breached, what valuation you would put on it, or the size of actual buying audience… the fact is this Facebook listing represents a cultural change, enriched all the time by a new generation of house hunters who expect information to be at the tips of their fingers, with convenience and familiarity in the palm of their hand.
With it goes the erosion of the traditional value model estate agents build their business on; fees for doing something that people believe they can do themselves. Rightly or wrongly, this is just another movement in consumer behavior.
I suspect we will see much more of this in the future; as the major technology firms continue to put eco-systems of information at the heart of their engagement strategy.
Engagement strategy? is that like having agents load up a SAAS system and then having data they thought was secure distributed about like a tart’s favours?
Not quite; don’t be so quick to think so small.
Engagement strategies of the big four – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. They are making search and content inextricably linked; with the important fabric of social connections binding people to the platform and importantly, coming back for more.
I can’t think of a more engaging place to promote and distribute ‘things for sale’. As per my original post, this is not a case of ‘one or the other’ it’s more about a drift towards a world where the traditional agency value model is weakened with every successful ‘private’ experience.
As in ‘private sale’ experience… (before anyone jumps on the innuendo!)
Facebook, what a super idea. 59 plus people ‘liked’ a picture of a rather mundane looking meal. Over 2990 likes for a picture of a man holding a monkey (allegedly) completely unaware of the proximity of its ***** to his face.
Could he to be a d*** head? Well good luck to him!
The purchase price of £104,000 last December coupled with £60,000 spend doesn’t quite tally with the Zoopla estimate of £110,000 or £195,000 asking price.
That said it does look worth more than £110,000. Farrell and Heyworth still have this one or one very like it listed on RM.
Please like, comment and share for the chance to WIN this property.
Is there anything that can’t be Facebook-ed ?
In January 2013 we were told Property Places on Facebook would be ‘massive’, it isn’t. Despite all of the GMGPS stock reportedly being handed over to Mr Rashid and them getting thoroughly behind the project I for one have never come across the project since.
Another ‘disruptor’…
I take my hat off to Josh Hocking for having a go, I did my first doer upper at 21 but rather than be too smart and too greedy. I instructed the agent who sold it to me 9 months later having listened to them telling me what to do to get it turned over quickly, within the year I was on my 3rd project.
The wonderful thing about disruptors is their theoretical thinking on what is going to happen. We have used this story as a training exercise this morning. Young John thought this was going to be massive until I applied the practical realities of buying. It was summed up; how much time do you spend on Facebook now you are working? Hardly any. Of all the people you are connected to on Facebook how many have or or in a position to buy? 0.25%
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a (note, not ‘the’) future direction of estate agency.
I for one have no objection to offering a share of my commission to a Facebook user who introduces a buyer to one of my customers properties and may well trial this idea with one of my own customers homes very soon. We already pay Facebook to boost some of our property details posts with a link to our website, encourage users to share and tag interested parties and, separately, pay shared commission on joint or sub-agencies so why not offer Facebook users a share of our commission in the same way?
I, for one, would be very happy if my business page and a clients property received circa 79,000 shares on a no-sale, no-fee basis.
Dons tin hat…
If you share this status and I sell the house (from your share) I will pay you £1000!
one of the oldest property’s in the area with so much character throughout
It’s Stunning
Brand new extension, bathroom, kitchen, Central heating & Double glazed!£60,000 renovation done!
With 10% deposit, expect mortgage payments to be around the £875 mark!
Okay so PMA, ASA and the FCA Anything else he has flown in the face of?
£1,000 for a share……
I wonder what the price for a poke would be……
Is that the sort of question you should be asking publicly Ric or have I read that wrong?
If you have seen his write up of the property and it’s comment/advise on mortgage costs! no Estate Agent would get away with that, there are guidelines and rules as we know and the public seem not to have to abide by them.
I can guarantee this property is overpriced otherwise it would have sold given the endless positive feedback he has been receiving on Facebook, including from one viewer! He’ll get 100s of enquiries now, but 99% of them will be low quality and/or poorly qualified.
In theory the sole agency agreement would be enforceable because the introduction would have been indirectly through the agent. However, I don’t think you’d have a hope in hell of enforcing it. Sole selling rights solves this problem and is why more and more agents are using them.
I can see this happening more and more often in the future. Vendors sharing their rightmove link on their Facebook page, having direct contact from a friend of a friend, then claiming that the agent did not sell it.
Would your sole agency agreement guarantee you a fee if this was to happen today?
Change your contract to sole selling rights, job done, we changed last year to combat this type of thing.
‘Only two offers in four months’, ‘Hold out for the price’. I wonder if he could possibly be ‘fed up with estate agents’ because he doesn’t like being told that he’s too optimistic about the value of his property? (60 grand to renovate a place that presumably cost less than £130K. What did he do? Rebuild it brick by brick?!)
However optimistic there is still an agent somewhere will put it on …
I wonder how he will work out who to pay out of those 79,000 people who will no doubt claim ” it was me your honour!!”