I have used a few of these websites before and I found that http://www.owner.com.au generated the most inquiries. Although it doesn’t look like a great website it has been around for a long time which is great for two reasons.

1. Large amount of listings – more variety people searching for property resulting in more people looking there.

2. Search engine Ranking – The website appears high in search rankings in search engines.

For a free website i would recommend it to anyone who has a property to sell.

If you look at Graigslist the design of their website is very outdated and a lot worse than Owner.com.au. However, Craigslist is the largest classifieds website in the world with a major presence all over the US, UK and other countries.

What’s their secret? As T-Bone pointed out their website is simple yet affective and they achieve results for people who list with them and it is free.

These two websites are proof you don’t need all the “bells and whistles” to have a good website.

I have used http://www.owner.com.au and received a good number of enquiries.

Although you need to pay $99 http://www.diysell.com.au has yielded interest for my property as well. You can see the number of hits your property has received.

Both produced around the same amount of enquiries as each other.

Some of these website are very average and I doubt many people would visit them.

I think the problem with private selling websites is there are too many across the internet. Too many people think there is a quick dollar to be made from property owners who are selling privately by charging them fees to list their property on these websites.

Back 5 years ago when there were only a handful of sites such as http://www.owner.com.au, http://www.diysell.com.au and http://www.noagent.com.au property seekers looking for private selling websites knew which sites to look because there were only a few. Now days there would be at least 20 (Bob, i’d imagine you haven’t listed them all) of which 2 or 3 are any good.

What this means is that people searching for property continue to find the crap websites and then decided that all private selling websites are useless and revert to looking for property on http://www.realestate.com.au or http://www.domain.com.au.

I am not too sure about that. I think any succesful website should be able to stand on its own regardless of the amount of competition. If you can enable your website to be ranked high in natural search engine results, then it should be far superior than any other competitor.

Obviously, some private selling websites rank the highest in search engine results and these websites have very little excuse for not delivering property leads.

The underlying reason they do not deliver search results isn’t because of other inferior websites but rather because all private selling websites are useless. I don’t mean to offend anyone but I am simply stating the facts, they don’t deliver results because they do not have enough listings.

Jane, I wasn’t insinuating that private selling does not work, what i was saying that all private selling websites struggle to put your property in front of an audience. A very specific group of property buyers browse these websites, those looking for bargaining deals or buyers agents.

Any property searcher with “half a brain” would go straight to the big boys realestate and domain to search for properties. Perhaps five years when these websites were not as big a private selling website could compete. By times have changed and these large websites offer everything (including the kitchen sink) that property buyers are looking for.

has anyone who reads this blog ever listed their property with Domain?

It costs $699 to list a property with their website for one month. This is quite a bit of money, do they achieve excellent results?

I used them around 7 months ago. I can’t remember the exact price but I think it was around $299 a month. I wasn’t overly impressed with the response i received but thought it was worth a go.

I wouldn’t pay $699 I know that!

I appreciate everyones comments. Overall, there is a wide variety of websites where property owners / private sellers can list their real estate.

If you are not prepared to pay the fees which websites like Domain, realestateguide and onthehouse charge then you should look at alternative methods of online advertising.

Classified websites offer a great alternative option to advertise and they are often free. I know many private sellers use the free Gum tree and Craig’s List sites and have great success. I have also received good reports from ebay which allows owners to list a property as a classified ad for sale. I think they charge around $50 a month and one owner I spoke to said they received more inquiries there than the total amount they received on all other websites.

So look around as the large real estate advertising websites aren’t the only place which yield property inquiries.