Ask a homeowner what their estate agent cost them and most will answer with a percentage. "One and a half per cent," they might say, or "two." It sounds modest. Framed as a fee on the largest asset most people will ever sell, it looks very different.
Consider a home that sells for £350,000 — close to the average across much of England. A commission of 1.5% comes to £5,250. At 2%, it is £7,000. Add VAT and the bill climbs further. For a more expensive property, or a higher-percentage sole-agency agreement, the figure can pass £15,000 without anyone in the chain feeling they have done anything unusual.
That is money paid at the single most cash-sensitive moment of a household's life: the point of moving. It competes directly with the deposit on the next home, the stamp duty bill, the cost of the move itself and the repairs the new place inevitably needs.
A commission quoted as a small percentage becomes, on the average home, one of the largest single fees a household will ever pay.
None of this is to say estate agents do nothing. A good agent prices accurately, markets well, manages viewings, qualifies buyers and holds a fragile chain together through to completion. Those are real skills, and for many sellers they are worth paying for.
The problem is that the fee is bundled and percentage-based, so it scales with the value of your home rather than with the work involved. Selling a £600,000 house does not take twice the effort of selling a £300,000 one, yet the commission typically doubles. The percentage model quietly transfers a share of your equity to a third party regardless of how much marketing your property actually needed.
For years the honest answer to "is there another way?" was "not really." Private-sale sites existed but lacked the reach of the major portals, so sellers who went it alone often traded a lower fee for far fewer viewings. That trade-off is what kept most people paying full commission.
What has changed is reach. A homeowner today can list directly and still appear alongside agent-represented stock in front of the same active buyers. The listing tools that used to require an agency — professional-standard photography, floor plans, virtual tours, enquiry management — are increasingly available to owners directly, often at fixed prices you choose to pay only if you want them.
Before signing any agency agreement, it is worth asking three questions. First, what is the fee in pounds, not percentages? Convert it and sit with the number. Second, what exactly does it buy — and could you buy those components separately for less? Photography, conveyancing and a valuation can all be booked à la carte. Third, how much reach do you actually lose by listing directly? If the answer is "very little," the case for full commission weakens considerably.
Selling a home will always involve costs. But sellers are increasingly entitled to ask why one of the largest is calculated as a slice of their own equity — and to keep more of it when they can. The direct route is no longer a compromise on reach. Increasingly, it is simply the more transparent way to price the work that a sale genuinely requires.
