12 January 2019
By Bryan Smyth
bryan@TheCork.ie
Business News
Fixed price estate agency Auctioneera – which has an office on French Church Street, Cork City – has passed the €5m milestone in terms of properties sold / sale agreed. According to founder, Eddie O’Driscoll, the agency has saved property vendors over €70,000 in fees to date and business is picking up. “We wanted to give Irish property vendors a genuine alternative to the massively overpriced status quo and we are delighted to see more and more vendors voting with their wallets and choosing our fixed price offering.”
Auctioneera charges clients a fixed fee of €1,299+VAT to sell their property regardless of what the property sells for; this varies from traditional auctioneers who will typically charge in the region of 1.5%+VAT of the final selling price of a property. If a property sells for €300,000 for example, a regular agent will charge €4,500 excluding VAT (€5539 including VAT) with many also charging marketing fees on top of this.
Eddie O’Driscoll, Founder, Auctioneera.ie told TheCork.ie “Before Daft & MyHome, a local agent with a lot of buyers ‘on his books’ certainly added some value and maybe justified these high fees. The reality now, however, is that 100% of buyers are on Daft or MyHome so if your property is listed on there with professional photography, all interested parties will know it’s for sale”
Auctioneera founder Eddie O’Driscoll, holds a Commerce Degree from University College Cork
If international trends are anything to go by, O’Driscoll may be on to something with fixed price agencies such as Purple Bricks and Doorsteps taking ever increasing market share from traditional auctioneers in the UK. “We just don’t see the traditional estate agents being in business in 3 years’ time” continues O’Driscoll. “Things have moved on now. In the same way that the Internet has revolutionised many other industries, it is doing likewise to the real estate brokerage market and the ultimate beneficiaries of this are buyers and sellers of property in the Irish market.” Fighting talk indeed and of course long-standing auctioneers will fight hard to retain the lucrative status quo. Interesting times ahead for the Irish property market it would appear!
