There is no doubt in my mind that you can get more money for your house and in most cases sell it quicker by selling it yourself.

I know this because several years ago I was involved in selling many houses as a licensed real estate salesman and I know full well that there is nothing a real estate salesperson can do that the average intelligent person who is not an experienced property seller can’t. Also, as a private individual I have sold four properties of my own without the aid of a real estate agency.

In one of those cases, I sold an apartment without even meeting the buyer. I simply advertised that it was for sale; my tenant showed potential buyers through it, and when one buyer decided to make an offer he phoned me. I told him to put the offer in writing through his solicitor and get his solicitor to send it to mine. I then went to my solicitor, studied the offer, accepted it and signed it. Our respective solicitors, as in the case when properties are bought and sold through agencies, attended to the change of ownership transactions.

In 2003, my wife and I sold our house in Wellington privately with no trouble at all. The rateable value of the property was $205,000, which we thought was a bit low. Since several real estate people, without us making the request, were continually offering to give us a free appraisal, we took up the invitation by one of them. This man thought our property would fetch up to $220,000. We still thought that it was worth more, based on the selling prices of other properties we knew of that had recently sold.

Anyway, after this, we spent about six thousand dollars on renovations and repairs, tidied up the grounds and put a few extra pot plants round the house. Then we called in a friend who is a registered valuer to give us a verbal valuation, which he kindly did without charge. He spent some time doing his homework and suggested that we put it on the market for $230,000. But he didn’t expect us to get much more than $220,000. We very much appreciated his kindness. However, without telling him so, we still considered this estimate to be too low.

The following Saturday we placed a very descriptive ad in the Wellington daily newspaper with the selling price at $245,000, had a flood of replies, and got an almost unconditional cash offer for the full amount the next day. The only condition was that the purchaser’s solicitor could search the title.

Selling a property can be so simple and so quick that once while working for an agency I sold someone’s property without ever seeing the house, without meeting the owners and without meeting the buyer. This happened when one of the other salespersons for the company I was working with listed the particular property.

After reading the details about her latest listing, it appeared to me that this house might suit the requirements of a client who had previously phoned me to enquire about a different property that I was dealing with. So I rang this man about the new listing, gave him the address and told him to go and look at it from the outside over the weekend and, if it appealed to him, he should ring me and make an appointment with me to take him through it.

So he went up to the house on his own and, while he was looking at it, the owner, who happened to be doing some gardening, asked him why he was looking at it with such interest. My client explained that a salesman had told him that the house was on the market and he was interested. So the owner offered to show him through the house there and then. My client liked the house and enthusiastically rang me first thing on Monday morning to tell me that he was going to his lawyer to draw up an offer and that he would bring it in to me at our office to take to the seller.

When he brought the offer in to the office I wasn’t there, so my colleague who listed the property, who was, naturally, keen to get her cut for listing the property, took the offer to the vender herself, and after a bit of discussion he signed it. I was told that he was a bit indignant that he had to pay a $9,000 commission (this was many years ago) when we only had the property listed for one weekend, had only placed one ad in the newspapers and only directed one person to the property whom he showed through the house himself.

However, he conceded that he had previously had the property on the market with another company, which he had given a two-month exclusive agency to for no avail and that he didn’t have to pay for their efforts to try and sell it.

To this day, I don't know what either the buyer or seller looks like and I have no idea whether the house, which I never visited or saw photos of, was worth what it was sold for or not. (This sale, like the sale of my own properties, was made in the days before Marketing on the Internet became the dominant method of marketing.) As in the case of virtually all real estate agency transactions, although I was officially a salesperson, I was merely someone who connected a buyer with a seller. There is no special skill required to do this. The lawyers handle the tricky business.

In most cases property owners are far, far better equipped to sell their own properties than real estate salespeople simply because they know more about their houses than any salesperson could know and they are therefore better informed to answer all the questions that potential buyers will ask. Salespeople get virtually all their relevant information about a property from the vendors. If sellers can pass information on to a sales person, or a group of them, why should they not be able to pass it on to prospective buyers?