Online Estate Agents UK: What They Cost, and Where the Saving Goes

An online estate agent sells your home for a flat fee rather than a slice of the sale price. The fee is often £999, and £300 to £1,500 across the market. A high street agent on the average rate of 1.42% including VAT would charge about £4,260 on a £300,000 sale. So the saving is real. On that sale the online agent route leaves you £3,181 ahead, once the £999 fee and the £80 identity check are both counted. The catch is what you give up to get it.

Here is the verdict. The saving holds if your home sells and the price holds with it. It does not hold if you pay upfront and the sale falls through. It does not hold if you achieve 1.1% less on the price, because on a £300,000 sale that gap is £3,300, more than the whole £3,181 saving. Tax does not move that break-even either. If the sale is taxable you keep less of the saving and lose less of the gap, so the two cancel out. The model suits a straightforward home in a busy area, sold by someone who can run their own viewings and could absorb the loss of the fee. It suits fewer people than the price tag suggests.

• Typical flat fee: £999 with Purplebricks, £300 to £1,500 across the market.
• What the high street costs instead: about £4,260 on a £300,000 sale at 1.42% including VAT.
• When you pay: upfront, or a deposit now and the rest on completion, or 10 to 12 months later.
• If the sale falls through: upfront money is not refundable. Completion money is not payable.
• Viewings: yours by default, or about £300 extra to have them done for you.
• Right to cancel: 14 days from signing, whether you signed online or at your kitchen table.
• Tax: the fee comes off a taxable gain, but only where a sale actually completes.

What is an online estate agent, and how is it different from a high street agent?

It does the same job from a central office rather than a branch near you. It values the property, takes the photographs and the floor plan, writes the listing, and puts it on the big portals. Purplebricks lists on Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket as well as its own site. Offers reach you through an online account or an app, rather than a phone call from a shop down the road.

Two things change. The first is the fee shape: a fixed amount rather than a percentage, so the bill no longer grows with the price. The second is who does the local work. Viewings are usually yours, and so is judging the right asking price for your street. Holding a wobbly chain together often is too.

One firm on your shortlist may not be an estate agent at all. If a business takes your instructions and works to sell your home, it is doing estate agency work, and every agency rule applies to it. If all it does is publish your advert, or let you and a buyer message each other, it sits outside those rules. That line decides whether you have a redress scheme behind you.

Brand lists also go stale fast. Strike was the best known free online agent, and it no longer runs as a separate site. Its web address now redirects to Purplebricks. Make sure a name still exists before you build a shortlist around it.

What does an online estate agent do for the fee?

You get the marketing, and you often supply the labour. A standard package covers the valuation, the photographs, a floor plan and the written listing. It puts the property on the portals, and it gives you an account where enquiries land plus someone to pass offers between you and the buyer.

What you do yourself is the part that decides the price. Which? puts it plainly: the default option with most online estate agents is that you conduct the viewings yourself. Having them done for you costs around £300 more, on the same source.

Chain chasing is the other gap to ask about. Once a sale is agreed, someone has to ring the buyer's solicitor every week and find out why the searches have stalled. Some packages include that work and some leave it with you. Ask before you sign, because it is the work that saves a sale in month three.

What do online estate agents charge?

Four fee shapes cover almost everything on the market, and the prices below come from the providers' and comparison sites' own pages.

Fee shape	What it costs on a £300,000 sale	What you owe if the sale falls through
Flat fee, paid upfront	£999 with Purplebricks. £300 to £1,500 across the market	The whole fee. Upfront payments are not refundable
Deposit now, balance on completion	£150 now and £2,099 on completion, so £2,249 in total, with the provider's conveyancer required	The £150 only. The completion fee is payable only if the property sells
Deferred, or pay later	The flat fee, billed 10 to 12 months on	Depends on the wording. Read whether the bill lands on completion or on a fixed date
Percentage commission, the high street comparator	About £4,260 at the average 1.42% including VAT	Usually nothing, because most high street contracts are no sale, no fee
Add to any online package	£80 identity check fee	Charged on top of the headline price, whichever package you pick
Cheapest if the sale completes	£999 plus £80, so £1,079	Cheapest headline, biggest loss if it does not

The flat-fee prices, the conveyancing condition and the £80 check fee are Purplebricks' own published package terms. The £300 to £1,500 market range and the deferred option are Which?'s. The 1.42% high street average is the HomeOwners Alliance figure. Cash figures at £300,000 are worked from those rates.

Named brands run wider than the market range suggests. MoneySavingExpert lists flat fees from £129 to £1,599, covering Visum, Emoov, Yopa and Purplebricks. Those are prices on one date rather than a ranking. Our page on the cheapest estate agent fees runs the comparison properly.

The percentage side moves with your price and the flat fee does not, which is the whole arithmetic of the model. At 1.42% including VAT a high street agent costs about £2,840 on a £200,000 sale, and about £6,390 on a £450,000 one. The flat fee is the same £999 in both cases, so the gap widens as the price rises. Other published averages sit nearby: about 1.3% including VAT on Rightmove's 2025 data, and a quoted range of 0.75% to 3% plus VAT. Our guide to what estate agents charge to sell a house sets out the benchmark in full.

What happens to your money if the house does not sell?

The fee comparison stops before this question. Purplebricks states its position on its own packages page in two short sentences. Upfront payments are not refundable. The completion fee is only payable if your property sells. Read together, they tell you exactly where your risk sits.

On the £999 upfront package, a sale that never happens costs you £999 plus the £80 check fee. On the £150 and £2,099 package, the same failed sale costs you £150. The cheaper headline is the riskier one, which is the opposite of how it reads on the website.

Deferred packages need one more question, because the bill can be 10 to 12 months away. If it falls due on completion, it behaves like the completion fee above. If it falls due on a date whether or not you have sold, you are being lent money, so ask who is lending it and on what terms before you agree. Do not assume either way from an advert.

So ask this before you sign anything. What do I owe on the day I take the house off the market? A good agent answers in one sentence. Tie in periods change that answer too, and our page on estate agent contract tie in periods covers how long you can be held.

Are online estate agents regulated?

If the firm works your sale, yes, and on the same terms as a branch. It must tell you in writing what the fee is, when it is payable, and what else you may be charged, and that has to happen before you are bound. If it does not, the agent cannot enforce the contract without going to court, and a court can cut the fee or wipe it out.

It must also belong to an approved redress scheme. For sales work there are two, both named on gov.uk. They are The Property Ombudsman, and the Property Redress Scheme, which now trades as Property Redress. Trading without membership carries a £1,000 penalty. Checking membership takes a minute, and it is the only route to an independent ruling later.

The price a firm advertises has to be the price. Since 6 April 2025 the rules on misleading omissions have required the total price in an invitation to buy a service, including the fees a seller cannot avoid. An £80 identity check that every seller pays is part of the cost of selling rather than an optional extra, so add it in when you compare.

None of that reaches a business that only advertises. If a firm's entire service is a listing and a message inbox, there is no fee disclosure duty and no scheme behind it. Ask which it is, then check the membership rather than taking the answer on trust.

Can you cancel after you have signed up online?

Yes, and almost no seller is told so. Signing on a website makes it a distance contract. Signing at your kitchen table during a valuation makes it an off premises contract. Both give you 14 days to cancel from the day the contract is made, and you do not need a reason.

What you owe on cancelling depends on what happened in those 14 days. If you expressly asked the agent to crack on, you pay for what has actually been supplied, in proportion to the full contract. If the agent never gave you the cancellation information, or the work started without you asking, you pay nothing at all. And where that information was never given, the window to cancel runs on for up to 12 months.

One limit on all of that. If the service is finished inside the 14 days, and you asked for it to start knowing you would lose the right, the right to cancel is gone.

Put a figure on it. You sign on the 1st and ask them to get moving, and they photograph and list the property on the 3rd. You change your mind on the 9th. You are inside the 14 days, so you can cancel, and what you owe is a proportion of the work done rather than the whole £999. Six days of listing out of a full selling service is a small slice of that. If nobody told you about the right to cancel, it is nothing.

Who does the viewings with an online estate agent?

You do them, unless you pay the extra £300 or so. That is the default across most of the market, and it is the part of the model sellers most often underestimate.

Doing your own viewings is not automatically worse. You know the house, and a buyer who likes you may bid with more confidence. It is worse when you cannot be there. Think of an empty property, a job that ends at seven, or a move that has already taken you 200 miles away. Each one turns free viewings into missed ones, and a missed viewing is a lost buyer.

There is also the negotiating point. It is hard to hear a criticism of your own kitchen and stay level, and harder still to hold out for another £5,000 in your own hallway. If that sounds like you, price the accompanied option in from the start rather than treating it as a saving.

What is a hybrid estate agent?

It is a real thing, and the label matters less than the three questions below. A hybrid agent puts a local self employed agent in front of the central office. That person values your home, often does the viewings, and is the name on your emails. The listing, the admin and the offer handling still run centrally, which is what keeps the price down.

The label is not worth arguing about. Firms use it loosely, and some offer both a flat fee and a percentage. Judge the offer instead. Who values the property? Who shows buyers round? On what day does the money leave your account? Three answers tell you what you are buying, whatever the website calls it.

Do online agents get you a lower price for your home?

Nobody can currently prove it either way, so be wary of anyone who says otherwise. Which? sets out both positions without picking one. A flat fee gives less incentive to sell for the highest possible price, and providers say they usually achieve the asking price. It offers no data on which is right.

The figures quoted against online agents are older than they look. The best known comparison page on the subject is undated, rests on an investment bank chart from February 2018, and adds a claim from its own unpublished study. That is a position rather than evidence, and eight year old market data is not much use for a decision being made now.

So use the arithmetic instead. On a £300,000 sale the online agent route saves you £3,181 against the high street average, with the £80 check included, and a 1.1% difference in the price you achieve is £3,300, which wipes that out. The fee is the number you can see, and the price is the number that decides whether you came out ahead. Put your effort into the asking price and the negotiation, not the last £100 of fee.

Is the fee tax deductible when you sell?

Only where the sale is taxable at all. If you are selling the home you have lived in throughout, private residence relief normally means there is no capital gains tax to pay and nothing to deduct against. On a second home, an inherited property or a former rental, the picture changes.

There, the selling agent's fee comes off your gain, and so does the cost of advertising for a buyer. It makes no difference whether the agent was online or on the high street. A private seller who cannot reclaim VAT deducts the VAT inclusive figure, so the £999 actually paid is the £999 that goes in. Sell a former rental at a £40,000 gain and that fee cuts the gain to £39,001. At 24% that is about £240 less tax.

The upfront model has a sting here that the completion model does not. The costs that reduce a gain are the costs of making a disposal, so they need a disposal to attach to. Say you pay £999 in March plus the £80 check fee, and then the buyer walks in June and the house comes off the market. There was no sale, so the £1,079 is gone from your bank and buys you nothing in tax either. Relist the following year and complete, and the fee you pay then comes off that year's gain instead.

Where tax is due, you have 60 days from completion to report it and pay. Our complete guide to capital gains tax on property covers the rates, the reliefs and the reporting clock.

Should you use an online estate agent?

It suits you if your home is easy to price and easy to sell. Think of a standard house or flat, in an area where similar homes move quickly, at a price the portals will find buyers for on their own. It suits you if you can be at the property for viewings, if you are comfortable negotiating, and if losing the fee would annoy rather than hurt.

Avoid it if the property is unusual, high value, or hard to compare with anything nearby, because that is exactly where a local agent's judgement earns the extra £3,000. Avoid it if you are in a chain that needs chasing, if you cannot get to viewings, or if you need the sale to happen rather than merely hoping it will. And avoid the upfront package in particular if the fee is money you cannot afford to write off.

If the fee is your main worry, two other routes are worth reading first. Selling without an estate agent at all removes the fee and adds the work. The wider cost of moving house shows where the fee sits, and it is rarely the biggest line.

Once you have a fee shape in mind, put your own numbers through the cost of selling calculator. It tells you what a flat fee actually saves you at your price, in under a minute. The whole bill, agent and otherwise, is set out on our guide to the cost of selling a property.