Selling your French property yourself

I RECENTLY received an email from a reader of the site asking me about selling their French property themselves.

The first thing to remember is that the sale will still have to go through a notaire, and there are some other legal considerations (see Selling your French property).

But cutting out the estate agent’s fees is what appeals to many.

Of course most agents would say that you are missing out on their marketing skills and the fact that they have a list of potential buyers on tap.

But like all businesses the internet allows individuals to cut out the services of many ‘middle-men’ and do things your own way.

If you are going down this route there are two main areas to consider. The first is the creation of a website promoting your home, the second is marketing it and getting it in front of plenty of people.

If you already have a website for your holiday home then it could be a simple job of adding a ‘for sale’ notice on your site, just make sure the fact that the home is up for sale is easy to view from every page.

But if you do not have a website, maybe your home is just that, then you will need to look at creating your own.

There are more and more services offering you the chance to create mini sites that allow you to post photographs and descriptive text, which you edit whenever you want.

Google Base is one such service that allows you to prepare a page for your home, along with anything else, in a few simple steps.

I prepared a sales page within a few minutes, uploaded a couple of photographs and had a direct link to the page I could use for marketing purposes.

A quick note on using photos, the file size and dimensions should be kept to a sensible size. For example a landscape picture should be around 400 pixels wide, with a maximum file size of around 50kb.

You won’t get any real benefits from making them larger and all you will succeed in doing is to make the web page load slower.

With your mini site ready, the most difficult part is actually marketing it and promoting the fact that your property is for sale.

An easy way is to use one of the most popular sites on the internet – eBay.

There is a section that allows people to promote properties for sale for a flat fee of £35, and instead of it being an auction it is just a simple advertisement page.

So using the descriptive text and images you prepared for your Google Base page just copy and paste it into a new item and get it up on the site.

One very simple tip is to give your words plenty of room to breath, so break up bulky paragraphs and ensure you use black text, it is so much easier to read.

But you are going to have to be smart to promote your property and ensure plenty of people see it.

Dropping in on messageboards that deal with France and offering advice to people is a useful way to ensure your property is seen by others – but be sensible about it.

If someone asks a question about gardening, and you can help out then leave a reply, but when you sign off a simple line pointing out your house for sale and link will get people clicking on it.

Another method is to look for websites in your region and see if they will run a small advert on their site for a month or two.

One of the problems of selling a home with a stand alone page is that the website address is usually very long, making it difficult to display within a newspaper advert or magazine, as this is another possible route to promote your property.

To get around this you could use the TinyURL.com service that shrinks long links into little ones, so that my Google Base link now looks like:

tinyurl.com/zs4a6

This will fit very easily into a small block advert in your local newspaper and still give you plenty of room to write an enticing description.

Also feature the link to your sales page on all your outgoing emails and check whether you have an internal messageboard at work, again having this short link will be a real help.

Really the secret is to keep it simple, both for yourself and potential buyers.

A clear and easy to read description, with a number of photographs, will mean you are able to spend more time marketing your property and not have to answer endless questions.

What tips would you give people who want to sell their home themselves? Please feel free to leave a comment below.