This article from Lawpack's Sell your own Home Kit discusses the details to include when preparing particulars to market your property.
There are a number of essential items that your property details must include and others that you are advised to include if you want to produce a professional job that competes with or exceeds the standard set by the top estate agents. These are:
The address of the property with the postcode
If you are worried about security, you can omit the name of the property or the number in the street. But it is important to include the postcode because viewers need this information if they want to research the area.
Your contact details
Buyers need to be able to contact you easily, so give as many telephone numbers as possible: your home number, your work number, your mobile number and your email address. You can omit your home number if you are worried about security but, if you do, make sure you keep your mobile switched on while you are selling your home.
The price of the property and tenure
If you have followed the advice above, you should now have no difficulty setting a price. Make sure you say whether the price is for a freehold or leasehold . This applies only in England and Wales; in Scotland, the concepts of leasehold and freehold do not apply as all property is simply owned.
Details of the lease
If the property is leasehold (England and Wales only), indicate when the lease was granted and for how many years, because this can affect the price. For example, some short leasehold properties with, say, less than 25 years left on the lease can appear cheap, so it would be misleading to omit this information. However, most leases are granted for 99 years or 125 years, so a typical description might be: 'Lease granted for 125 years from 1 January 1990', which buyers can work out means that the lease doesn't expire until the year 2115 and in 2005 there are 110 years still to run. The important date is not the date on which the lease was signed but the date which the lease runs from; for example, a lease signed on 28 April 1990 might actually run from 25 March. The lease will say something along these lines 'a lease granted for a term of 125 years from 25 March 1990'.
A picture of the property
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is certainly true when you are selling a property. Most potential buyers will reject details which don't have at least one picture of the property. It is also a good idea to include photographs of the key rooms such as the kitchen, living room and main bedroom, the garden and any other rooms which you think might tempt in the buyers.
Aim to produce your details digitally on a computer so that you can produce both paper-based and web-based versions. Pictures can be taken with any camera, although a wide angle lens helps when you are taking pictures of confined spaces, but don't overdo the wide angle as this can also create a misleading picture. This is the moment to think about investing in a digital camera. Treat the cost - you can buy a camera which will do the job for around £150 - as a marketing expense and remind yourself you will have the use of it long after you have sold your property. The other alternative is to use photographic prints and scan them in to your computer. If you don't have a scanner, you can take them to a photographic shop, including those based in larger chemist shops, and have them put onto a CD which you can then load onto your computer. With all this new technology, it is possible to crop pictures, but don't do this if it creates a misleading picture or results in some unattractive feature being removed.
The brief description
Anyone who has ever gone property hunting knows that you need to plough through endless details very quickly. This applies whether you are browsing the property websites or peering through estate agents' windows. What the buyer needs to know quickly is whether the property is detached or semi-detached or terraced; how many bedrooms it has; how many reception rooms; and bathrooms and how big the garden is; whether there is a garage or off-street parking; and whether it is freehold or leasehold; and for flats which floor it is on (unless it is on the fifth floor and there is no lift when this information is better omitted). Keep these initial details brief although it is always worth putting in any big selling point, such as a south-facing garden or ensuite bathroom. Use numerals when referring to the number of rooms because these are quicker to read than words. Also remember to include whether your property has any restrictions on it, such as being a listed building.
Free yourself of estate agent jargon
Keep your property details simple and free of flowery estate agent language and catch phrases. Go through your details and check your use of adjectives. In property details adjectives such as 'delightful' or 'unique' (and don't use that one unless the feature is truly unique!) clutter up what you are trying to say and add nothing to the overall impression you want to create. Here is a list of descriptions and words frequently used by estate agents but which are better avoided entirely or used only sparingly.
The location of the property and a brief description of the area
Locate the property by reference to nearest towns, major roads, train and London Underground stations. For example, a property in the Clifton area of Bristol, could be described as being in 'north-west Bristol; two miles from the centre of the city; half a mile from Clifton Down station; two miles from Junction 3 on the M32 and seven miles from Bristol airport'; whereas a country property could be described as 'standing back from the B1135 between the market towns of Dereham and Wymondham, which has a regular train service to Cambridge'. It is not necessary to go into enormous detail here about the area.
The dimensions of the rooms
Buyers expect to see the dimensions of the rooms on the details and because not everyone is familiar with metric measurements, it is a good idea to include both metric and imperial. If you decide to have a floor plan drawn up (see 10 below) this will provide you with all the room measurements you need. If you decide to do your own measuring, all you need is a good-quality measuring tape and two people, or one person and a sonic measure which takes accurate measurements using a sonic beam. A basic sonic measure which is adequate for measuring properties costs around £30.
If your room is an odd shape, it is permissible to show the longest or widest dimension, but this must be mentioned adding after the measurement a phrase such as 'at the widest' or 'into the bay', as appropriate.
The floor plan
It is not essential to produce a floor plan but it does help buyers, not only before they view the property but also afterwards when it acts as a useful aide-mémoire. Not everyone is at ease reading a floor plan, so if a viewer shows interest in your property, it is a good idea to sit them down with the floor plan and take them through it, which will help them retain important information about how the spaces and any unusual changes of level work.
Floor plans cost between £50 and £100 to get drawn up, less if you already have architectural drawings of your property, and most firms offering this service can arrange to have one drawn up in a couple of days. Floor plans include all the room measurements, so if you do decide to have a floor plan drawn up, you won't need to measure the rooms yourself.
The area of the property
These days buyers are sophisticated and some like to compare property prices using the cost of each square foot or square metre of space. By establishing a baseline for property prices in a particular area using this measure, buyers can easily work out if a property is cheap or expensive for the area. For example, if the average price per square foot in your area is £200, the selling price of a 1,500-square-foot house should be £300,000. It follows that a similar-sized house on the market at £280,000 is either cheap or needs work, and another on the market at £325,000 is either in very good condition or is overpriced.
If you decide to get a floor plan drawn up, make sure you ask for the area of the house, both in metric and imperial measurements. If you opt to measure your own property, you can produce a rough approximation of the floor space by adding up the area of all the rooms you have measured and adding 20 per cent for 'circulation' space, i.e. hallways and staircases. By all means quote this figure in your property details but with the caveat that it is an approximate figure.
Finally, remember to get someone to proof-read your particulars.
