Why sell at auction?
Benefits to selling at auction
If you’ve sold land or property before, chances are this was done by ‘private treaty’ through an estate or land agent. This is the most common way to sell land and property in the UK and it’s where you list your land or property for sale, conduct viewings and receive an offer.
Once negotiated and accepted, the solicitors will work on the contract of sale and purchase until you exchange contracts with the buyer and you receive the completion funds a few weeks later.
This can be a time-consuming process, taking an average of 156 days to finish. There is also the risk of a sale falling through, which happens on average about 30% of the time.
Selling at auction follows some of these familiar steps, but it is much quicker, more transparent, and far more secure.
There are three main benefits to selling at auction: security, speed and transparency:
Conditional vs unconditional auction
Depending on what you are wanting to achieve from the auction, we have two main routes of sale, conditional or unconditional.
Unconditional, or traditional auction, is where at the end of the auction, contracts are unconditionally exchanged and completion is normally set for 20 working days later.
Conditional auction, or the modern method of auction, is where at the end of the auction, buyers pay a non-refundable reservation fee and are contractually bound to exchange and complete on their purchase within 56 days. This route does allow a little more time to buyers to secure finance on the property which opens this route to more traditional sources of finance such as a residential
mortgage (subject to lending criteria). For further information on the differences between conditional and unconditional auction, please click here: Conditional vs Unconditional auctions.
