Sarah Beeny: How to sell without an estate agent

On Sarah Beeny's new website you can sell your home without an estate agent. Is this the future for the housing market, asks Anna Tyzack

6:00PM GMT 22 Jan 2010

If I were an estate agent, Sarah Beeny's latest venture would send a shiver down my spine. The television presenter and mother of four is intent on revolutionising the way we buy and sell houses. How? By using the most powerful tool available to us – the internet. Beeny's new site www.Tepilo.com matches buyers and sellers without the need for an estate agent. And if the global success of her dating website, www.mysinglefriend.com , is anything to go by, it will fly.

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On Tepilo.com, home-sellers can advertise their property for sale or rent at no cost, along with pictures, floor plans and maps. It's a seriously sleek bit of kit – more like a glossy magazine than a website; Beeny assures that a complete computer dunce could upload their home onto it in less than 15 minutes. The site includes information on buying, selling and letting; it will help you to arrange a Home Information Pack; and remind you when you have a viewing or need to contact your solicitor.

"It's a simple way of saving money – lots of money," Beeny says. "For a £250,000 house – and it's not unrealistic to have a house worth this much – you will be paying about £10,000 to the estate agent, and then you've got to pay £900 for legal costs."

Really, she couldn't have picked a better time to appeal to people's thriftiness. The economic crisis destroyed people's confidence in the property market, and those who were making money out of it. "House prices had to go down and did so quite quickly. But this is good in a way. Now the property market is a more realistic place and we're probably safer. Human beings like a disaster story and there hadn't been one for a while. People are ready for a shake-up," Beeny says.

A crash, she says, makes you question whether what you're doing makes sense. "A lot of people were doing things that were a waste of money. Now they look at their credit-card bills harder. If you're bad value for money I'd be worried right now."

Estate agents, this means you. "It was money for old rope. Now those that survive will be the one's that have had to shape up," she says. "There will always be estate agents because some people are too busy, or lazy to sell their house themselves. But we will use them in the way we use travel agents or wedding planners."

The rest of us will turn to the internet – and Tepilo.com, she hopes. "The internet will become even more widely used. In the past if you had an email address you were considered a techie – now if someone doesn't have one I think, oh blimey.

"Already 99 per cent of buyers are finding their homes online. I would be amazed if by 2015 about 50 per cent of normal people with normal houses weren't selling them directly online. Yes, some people may employ somebody to put the property online for them – to take the pictures and draw the floor plans. But this will cost £8 per hour, not thousands of pounds. They won't need a shop front or a branded Mini."

A one-stop, home-selling website is surely the next logical step for a society adept at organising its finances, holidays and cars online. "These days, we're used to staying in control," Beeny says. "You are a powerful decision-maker in the world of the internet. Ultimately, you can choose pictures of your house and do you own research about house prices without an estate agent. It's not a science – it's what similar houses have sold for in your area. There's no reason why you can't be accurate."

That's not to say selling a home is easy; Tepilo.com is designed to guide you through all the various stages of the process.

"For me, websites have got to be simple and straightforward. I wouldn't know how to make details look pretty or take the right photographs. Tepilo helps with all that, and finding a solicitor."

The idea is that by cutting out the middleman – that is the estate agent – the transaction will go more smoothly. "It brings the seller and the solicitor closer together. The more people in a conversation, the longer it takes," Beeny says.

Beeny believes that private selling will help to stabilise house prices, and may even bring them down a little. "People will sell for the amount they're offered. At the moment there's a slop, which is the amount you know you have to pay the estate agent."

There are now more than 6,000 homes advertised on Tepilo.com, either for sale, or for rent. "I didn't think it would get so big so fast, and I didn't think we'd have a sale so quickly. Within three weeks, a house had sold and in two months there were 5,000 properties. The site is flying – people were even uploading properties on Christmas Day."

Does she worry about competition from rival websites? "There are other sites, but they just don't do it very well. It's important to make sure ours is the best," she says.

For Tepilo.com to take off, Beeny is dependent on people buying and selling houses – difficult in an uncertain market, which she admits is unlikely to improve significantly over the next 12 months.

"I know a lot of people waiting for prices to jump up and I think they will be waiting a long time," Beeny says.

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She has no plans to invest in property this year, mainly because she is in the process of restoring a large house ("a passion project") and has recently given birth to her fourth child, Laurie. "We've been working on the personnel portfolio, not the home portfolio recently," she says.

But that's not to say she won't be keeping her eye out for good deals on Tepilo.com. "I've been interested in property since I was 19," she says. "My father was an architect and we had a development and investment company. Before I was on television, property was all I did." Thus her friends weren't particularly surprised when she started up Tepilo.com, particularly given her interest in matchmaking.

"Any tool that makes life simple is a good thing. Property's internet revolution has been a long time in coming. It's exciting to see change."

The site isn't about to turn Beeny into a millionaire property tycoon, though – it has not been set up as a profitmaking venture. "Buildings are tools to live in – it's the people that are interesting," she says. But in the future she hopes sponsorship will enable the site to pay for itself, and start making some money.

"I've got a good feeling about it," says Sarah Beeny. "Thousands of couples wouldn't be together if it wasn't for mysinglefriend.com. It would be nice to be responsible for revolutionising the way people buy and sell houses."

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