OZODO - sell your property for free

[John John]

Hi all,

Just wanted to test the waters with a new website we are developing. After constant frustration using estate agents and finding a generally poor standard of service offered for an often extortionate fee, we decided to create a website that allows anybody to upload a property for sale and advertise it online, privately, for free.

I know there have been and still are plenty of websites that do this, but by and large they are badly designed and difficult to use. We have worked very hard to create a platform that is intuitive for the user and makes your property look great. I'm confident that the website will be equal to or better than the offerings of all the big players.

We will also provide an in-depth guide to the whole selling/buying process giving users a detailed guide of what happens every step of the way, from initially marketing a property, to doing viewings through to exchange and completion.

Users will be able to upload their own photos, write their own description and upload a floorplan. As part of our research we've used many similar sites and again, feel we have created something far easier and simpler to use.

To make this a viable business concept we obviously need to make money. This will be done by providing services to take peoples photos, create their floorplans and carry out an EPC. These are ENTIRELY optional, you don't need to use these facilities if you are comfortable producing the property details yourself. There has been a huge shift in peoples comfort and ability to use online applications, we feel that most people are more then capable of producing a set of details themselves to a similar quality of most estate agents.

Now, most people will be thinking "what about rightmove and zoopla". Well that is a fair point. Initially traffic to the site will be small, but we hope to build up a strong local presence in south east London. I live locally in East Dulwich so it makes sense to concentrate our initial efforts in this area. We can provide a distinct 'for sale' board for a small fee which in this market is often enough to sell a house. Long term, we would hope to offer paid options to access rightmove and zoopla.

But our main concern is to offer a really viable alternative to the current estate agency model, which is entirely flawed. Selling a ?1,000,000 property for a 1.5% fee means a cost of ?15,000 to the vendor. The amount of work for the estate agent to undertake is similar to what they have to do to sell a flat for ?200,000 at 1.5%. This disparity in cost needs addressing.

We certainly don't think our service will be right for everyone, but we are curious to gauge interest and get feedback post launch. If you are interested in finding out more please visit http://www.ozodo.co.uk/ You can sign up to be notified when we go live with the site.

If you have any questions, please ask, all feedback is hugely appreciated.