Another high street agency offers auction option to vendors

Earlier this month Fine & Country announced it was to offer an auction option to vendors - now the Surrey agency Christies is to do the same thing. 

The agency, which is based in Cheam, has partnered with Network Auctions and operates as part of its auction offer the ‘Network E’ service which - in the words of the Christies website - “combines the speed and certainty of traditional auctions with the best aspects of an estate agency sale.”

The winning bidder secures a fixed period, normally four weeks, in which to arrange surveys and finance prior to exchanging contracts; they pay a deposit of one per cent of the purchase price, subject to a minimum £3,500, in part payment for the property and the seller undertakes not to sell to anyone else during this period.

Christies’ first property to go to auction, on December 7, is a commercial one - a church in Sutton with a freehold site of a third of an acre and a guide price of £750,000. 

In August Network Auctions revealed it had signed its 100th partner estate agency office.

The Fine & Country auction offer rolls out to its 200 offices from next year but earlier this month the first Fine & Country property to sell at auction achieved 84 per cent over its starting price of £850,000.

Meanwhile Auction House, one of the country’s best known property auctioneers, recently teamed up with Coventry & Warwickshire-based agency Loveitts - which already had its own auction service - in the latest of a series of links between operators within the sector.