Selling A Property At Auction – The Quick & Easy Way To Make a Sale

Today I decided to sell a property at auction. For those of you who are regular readers of my blog it’s a property which I bought just last month – My Cheap London Auction Flat

I had the estate agents out to value it and I also checked with a big auction house what they felt it would achieve in the room. I was in two minds what to do as it would achieve a great rental yield and it had good potential for capital uplift as it’s in an up and coming area of London…however its always good to have extra money in your pocket now for when you find your dream project…and I’m currently on the hunt for a BIG project

So I decided to go with the auctioneer – they told me they could probably achieve £115-120k which admittedly was less than the estate agents, but by selling at auction you can be sure that once the hammer goes down the property is sold, the buyer exchanges on the day, pays 10% as a deposit and you complete 28 days later.  It’s a quick and easy way to sell property. The other thing with selling at auction is that you can also stipulate that the buyer pays a proportion of the purchase price towards your selling costs – something which you cannot do with an estate agent sale (maybe you can – I’ve never tried!).

Anyway, so I agreed with the auctioneer there would be a reserve of £110k.  Not really what I wanted to sell at, but the auctioneer assured me that should there be a good level of interest they would increase the reserve to £115k as I had wanted.

So then we had all the snow and people decided it was Christmas way earlier than what they should have…and people weren’t really that interested in buying a property at auction or attending viewings in the snow and cold…And the news forever broadcast that people should only travel if it’s “essential” or “vital” and in all honesty I guess viewing an auction property does not really fall into that category…

And so you’ve already guessed that I put it in the wrong auction house at the wrong time of year….we sold all in for £111k. OK I have to admit it’s a profit on the £96.5k I bought it for last month, and I didn’t do any work or anything at all to the flat.  So yes, in a way I made money for nothing.  But I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that I was disappointed with the result…(I really believe it should have achieved at least £115k) but there we have it – that’s auctions for you. It’s all about the room on the day. Some days you get lucky – other’s you don’t…

However at least I got myself a little something the previous week and I’ll post details about my new little flat in East Dulwich soon 🙂