Originally a sell-your-home site, Sarah Beeny's Tepilo is moving into online estate agency. Could the TV star help you to sell or let your home?
TV property guru Sarah Beeny launched Tepilo four years ago, a site that allowed homeowners to sell their homes online for free. But it's now changing to become an online estate agent. Let's take a look at how it's changing, and what it says about the pros and cons of selling your home yourself.
The Tepilo model
The idea of Tepilo was to break the near-monopoly that estate agents and established websites such as Rightmove have over UK property sales and letting.
You could showcase your home online with the help of tips and advice from resident property expert Beeny. You could buy, sell or let property for free, keeping '100% control and paying 0% commission'.
In other words it gave you an extra platform: a way to put your house on the market without paying commission to an agent. This could save you, say, 2% of the sale price of a home (a gain of £4,000 on a £200,000 sale).
As well as charging no agency fees, Tepilo claimed that it 'depersonalises the negotiation process', taking much of the stress out of buying or selling property. Helpful tips and advice guide users through the sales process, from advertising to the first viewing to the completed sale -- all via an online interactive account.
Tepilo turns into an estate agent
But after four years of existence, major changes are afoot at Tepilo.
Last week, the site announced that instead of simply being a sell-your-own-home site, Tepilo is evolving into an online estate agent. Beeny's baby has merged with Think Property, an Essex-based estate agency launched in August 2010. Peter Joseph, co-founder of Think Property, has invested in Tepilo and becomes its new chief executive.
Following its imminent relaunch, Tepilo will have dual roles. First, it will continue to allow private sellers to list their properties for free. Second, it will sign up paying agency customers whose properties will probably appear on major property portals such as Rightmove and Zoopla.
Tepilo - which has already registered with the Property Ombudsman - will have two sets of charges. Paying customers can either cough up £195 upfront and £895 on completion (a total of £1,090) or pay £595 upfront and zero on completion. In other words, paying everything upfront saves £495, but there is no guarantee that Tepilo will find you a buyer.
For these fees, Tepilo will carry out the usual estate-agency services, including taking photographs, drawing up a floor plan, obtaining an EPC (Energy Performance Certificate) and conducting a property visit for valuation purposes. These tasks will be carried out by a national network of agents appointed by Think Property.
Why transform Tepilo?
Tepilo's new backers clearly have faith in Beeny's brand, once allied to its new business model. They have invested heavily in its redesign, while Think Property itself is evolving into an online business. Indeed, its owners reckon that the old-school estate-agency model doesn't have long left.
[SPOTLIGHT]Joseph said: "It is fair to say that [Tepilo] has not worked in the way that it was originally thought. What people want is to have their properties on Rightmove and Zoopla: that is what the sellers want."
In its original form as a sale-by-owner site, Tepilo was banned from joining leading listings websites such as Rightmove and Zoopla. However, having been reincarnated as an online estate agency, it looks highly likely that Tepilo 2.0 will become members of various listings sites.
Can it succeed?
A whole industry of estate agents, lawyers, surveyors and mortgage lenders exists to serve the UK property market. These vested interests extract billions of pounds of fees from participants, while making the property market far more complicated than it need be.
That said, many of us will still prefer to use a traditional estate agent or lettings service, rather than get our hands dirty dealing with in the nuts and bolts of property transactions. But for those who want hands-on control of their property moves, then the new-look Tepilo is worth considering.
If it works, you've paid sharply lower agency fees. If it doesn't drum up a buyer, then it's cost you time, effort and money.
In addition, one possible pitfall is the risk of paying multiple-agency fees. If you are registered with an estate or letting agent and then sell or let through Tepilo, you may still be liable for your original agent's fees. So before paying up, make sure that you have a water-tight contract which allows you to sell elsewhere without paying your agent for failing to deliver.
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What's on Tepilo right now?
The acid test for Tepilo and other property websites is how many properties are actually being sold or let via the site. This is commercially confidential information, so I looked instead at how many properties are being advertised right now for sale or rent in the UK's 10 biggest cities. Here's what I found (cities sorted from highest to lowest population):
|
City |
No. of properties for sale |
No. of properties for rent |
|
London |
1,385 |
728 |
|
Birmingham |
46 |
7 |
|
Leeds |
85 |
66 |
|
Glasgow |
48 |
9 |
|
Sheffield |
57 |
18 |
|
Bradford |
44 |
9 |
|
Edinburgh |
56 |
4 |
|
Liverpool |
55 |
25 |
|
Manchester |
72 |
51 |
|
Bristol |
74 |
21 |
On the sales side, Tepilo isn't very popular outside of London, with especially low take-up in Birmingham, Glasgow and Bradford. However, in England's capital, Tepilo lists almost 1,400 properties for sale, which shows the site has attracted some interest from property players.
On the lettings side, listings outside London are few and far between, with just seven properties to let in Birmingham, nine in both Glasgow and Bradford, and a mere four in Edinburgh. Then again, this weakness reflects Tepilo's forced evolution from being a home-selling website to becoming more of an online estate agent.
Therefore, the lettings side needs some time to gain scale and momentum before it can be considered a viable platform for tenants to find landlords (and vice versa).
Why give Tepilo a try?
Dozens of online property websites have sprung up in the past decade, but most have folded within a couple of years. Even the mighty Tesco got burned in this market. The supermarket chain withdrew from online property sales after launching its 'sell your home for £199' service in 2007. By late 2008, the Tesco Property Market site had been sold to traditional estate agents Spicerhaart.
Currently, the biggest business model for online property listings involves estate agents paying fees to advertise on popular sites such as Rightmove, Zoopla and Primelocation. These firms fiercely resist all attempts to prise open their doors to personal sellers, as well as fighting off new entrants offering cut-price online estate agency.
Then again, were any small rival to succeed in winning market share from these incumbents, then it would well be Tepilo. Thanks to its celebrity founder, Beeny's baby has a decent chance of winning over converts from established home-selling websites.
If I were to put a property up for sale or rent, then I might well give Tepilo a go. After all, thanks to its policy of low or no fees, what would I have to lose?