Sherlock

Actually, you're all wrong. When you buy a freehold house you gain fee simple title to the property. The real owner is the Queen; she's just being kind and letting you think you own it...

Absolutely - Rightmove was set up by a consortium of estate agents so they have a very vested interest. I remember that Mann Countrywide were involved from the start; not sure who else... Back when I advertisd on The Little House Co (similar principle) in 2004 ish their listings were added to Rightmove, but that stopped soon afterwards. I guess the big agencies realised that they were shooting themselves in the foot by allowing private sellers to use their facilites so pulled the plug. Hopefully over the next few years Rightmove will lose some of its dominance in the market as revenue suffers (all down to those marketing budgets again!) Sherlock

I'm a sad case really... I love digging around online and finding information... It all started when trying to avoid a stalking ex-girlfriend and realising how easily I could be found by piecing together my online traces - a bit of a shock when I realised how much there was! On which note I had already guessed your sale was real, having found the purchase price of your flat in 2003 (although you were out by £2,499!). My post was intended to be light-hearted - I'm genuinely impressed by your salesmanship. I run a small IT consultancy and the hardest part for me is bringing in business and trying to sell; I'm utterly crap at it and wish I could stay technical, but I know just as well that marketing doesn't come cheap. Interesting to see your Yarg link though - I was at Fujitsu Europe when the PalmSecure partnering was going on - did that get rolled out into the schools in the end? I wish you the best of luck with the site though - I sold via The Little House Company a few years ago, and anything that avoids paying a lot of money for what (in my experience) is a crap service from an EA is very welcome indeed. I have friends who gave up trying to sell a flat in Harpenden over the summer, but if they do go back on the market I'll certainly point them to you! Sherlock

That was a very clever plug for your website, Mr Gray... It was the voucher code that gave it away - firstly for making a point of putting it in your post (in bold), secondly the code "coupon10-2008" doesn't really sound like a code that would have been given out in June/July. Reading through your posts again, you've managed to include all the pertinent points you'd want to make in a press release - cost to advertise on the site, saving over EA fees, where your advert will be seen, alerting potential customers to the consequences of being tied into a sole seller agreement... And the most beautiful part is how you garnered immediate acceptance by appealing to the very nature of us all on here... Serving up some uber-bearfood (your supposed sale going through at close to 2002 prices) is guaranteed to make you friends on HPC! Top marks for effort - you can only be a salesman or PR guy to have done that well ;-) Sherlock