A mother-and-children team has launched a property sales website explicitly designed to let sellers bypass estate agents altogether. Andrea Booth, together with her daughter Katie and son Chad, built the platform called Hownit after concluding, from their own experience selling a property, that agency fees were excessive. The site follows the model pioneered by early online estate agents, offering sellers a route to market their homes without handing a percentage of the sale price, or a fixed commission, to a traditional high-street firm.
The venture lands at a moment when the economics of property transactions remain under close scrutiny from both consumers and investors. For landlords managing portfolios across cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool, agency costs are a recurring line item that compounds across multiple disposals and acquisitions. Any credible alternative that promises to strip out a layer of fees is therefore of direct commercial interest, not merely a convenience for one-off home movers. The appeal of self-sale platforms has waxed and waned over the past decade, but the underlying grievance, that estate agency fees can feel disproportionate to the actual work involved in a transaction, has never fully gone away.
What makes the Booth family's venture notable is its framing. Rather than positioning itself as a tech disruptor backed by venture capital, Hownit is presented as a grassroots response from sellers who felt they were overcharged. That narrative has resonance. Consumer frustration with agency fees has been a recurring theme in the UK property market, and previous waves of online and hybrid agents built entire business models around undercutting traditional commission structures. Some of those platforms succeeded in capturing meaningful market share before consolidating or scaling back, while others struggled once the limits of a purely digital, agent-free service became apparent, particularly around viewings, negotiation and the handling of chains.
For first-time buyers and sellers, the proposition of avoiding estate agent fees entirely is attractive in principle, but it shifts responsibility onto the individual to manage marketing, viewings and negotiation themselves. In cities with fast-moving markets, such as London, Surrey and parts of Manchester, where competition for well-priced stock remains sharp, sellers may find the trade-off worthwhile if it genuinely preserves equity that would otherwise go to commission. In slower-moving regional markets, including parts of Newcastle and Liverpool, the value of an agent's local network and buyer relationships can be harder to replace with a website alone. This is where PropertyNews analysis suggests the real test for Hownit will lie: not in attracting sellers motivated by fee frustration, but in retaining them through to completion without the professional infrastructure that traditional agents provide.
Buy-to-let landlords and portfolio investors should watch this space with a practical eye rather than ideological enthusiasm. A platform that can reliably reduce transaction costs across a portfolio of disposals would materially improve net returns, particularly for investors managing multiple properties where commission fees accumulate quickly. However, landlords typically prioritise certainty and speed of sale over marginal fee savings, especially when timing a disposal around refinancing deadlines or portfolio restructuring. Commercial investors are likely to remain more cautious still, given that larger transactions depend heavily on professional representation, due diligence and negotiation leverage that a self-sale website is not designed to replicate.
Looking ahead six to twelve months, the emergence of ventures like Hownit should be read as a symptom of a wider structural pressure on traditional estate agency margins rather than an isolated curiosity. As sellers become more fee-conscious amid a challenging affordability environment, demand for low-cost or no-commission alternatives is likely to persist, and established high-street agents will need to continue justifying their fees through demonstrable value, whether that is pricing accuracy, buyer networks or negotiation outcomes. Developers and institutional sellers, who already often negotiate bespoke fee arrangements, are less exposed to this trend, but the broader signal for the residential resale market is that fee transparency and perceived value for money will remain a competitive battleground.
The ultimate significance of the Booth family's platform will depend on execution rather than concept. Fee-avoidance websites are not new, and the sector's history shows that cutting out agents is easier to promise than to deliver at scale. For investors and landlords, the prudent approach is to monitor how such platforms perform through full sales cycles, including chains and negotiations, before treating them as a reliable substitute for established agency channels.
