Should I Use the Modern Method of Auction if My House Isn't Selling? (A Real Consultation)

If your house has been sitting on the market with barely any viewings, there's a good chance someone has already pointed you towards the modern method of auction. It sounds like the answer: a fixed timetable, a buyer tied in with a reservation fee, and the whole thing done in a couple of months.

I've now done around 800 free consultations with home sellers, and this is one of the questions that comes up most. So here's a real one, with a seller who was days away from signing the paperwork. I've changed some details to protect her privacy.

The modern method of auction rarely fixes a house that isn't selling. It shrinks your buyer pool down to the few people who can bid, then cuts the price to attract them. A home that is already short of buyers can easily end up with none, and the same lower price on the open market gives you far better odds.

But the reasoning matters far more than the verdict. What makes modern auction fail for a home like this is the same thing that stalled the sale in the first place.

If you want to cut straight to the chase and find out whether modern auction is right for you and your property, I've built a free quiz that gives you the answer in about 60 seconds.

Hit the button below to get started:

1. Sarah's situation, and what she was about to sign

Sarah (not her real name) called me after finding our website while doing her own research.

Here's where she was:

• Months on the market, almost no interest. A couple of viewings in the best part of a year with her first agent, and none at all since she'd switched to a second one.
• A two-bedroom cottage in a remote village. Beautifully presented inside, but a long way from any large town.
• A mismatch buyers could spot instantly. The cottage sits right on a road, with its outside space away from the house. Most people hunting for a country cottage are picturing the opposite: seclusion, and a garden by the back door.
• No genuine deadline. She'd relocated for work and wanted it done, but a lodger was covering part of the cost, there was no chain, and no lender was breathing down her neck.
• A modern auction deal on the table. A suggested guide price of around £250,000, a reserve of around £275,000, and a fee of just over £12,000, with the auctioneer's timeline seeming to promise completion by early December.

She'd never bought or sold at auction, and neither had anyone she knew. But before we can judge whether modern auction is the answer, we have to be clear about what the actual problem is...

2. Why wasn't the cottage selling?

Almost no viewings on a remote property after months on the market usually points at the size of the audience being the problem, rather than the quality of the advert itself. In a remote area, only a handful of people are looking for any particular kind of home each month, so the whole sale hangs on being visible to every one of them.

The target market for Sarah's home was thin to begin with because of the area. But the uniqueness of the property made it even thinner.

It's a country cottage sitting on a road, being shown to buyers who mostly want seclusion. Nothing wrong with the home. It just appeals to a smaller slice of an already small audience.

It wasn't an agent problem either. Sarah was already with the agent with the best market share for this type of property in her area, and even they weren't producing viewings.

On a well-priced home in a busy area, I'd typically expect a couple of viewings a week. Here, the honest version is that there might only be one genuine potential buyer entering the market every month or two. Hold onto that, because it decides everything about the auction question...

3. Why I'd steer away from modern auction here

Modern auction was pitched to Sarah as the fix. On the call, we walked through why it's more likely to do the opposite.

Modern auction makes a hard sale harder. A home that's already short of buyers gets its pool cut down further, and specifically down to the people who pay the lowest prices. The price you're quoted isn't guaranteed either, and the salespeople have every reason to overvalue. And success rates are low at the best of times.

Here's the detailed breakdown of exactly why modern auction would make Sarah less likely to sell, the downsides even if she did, and why it's been recommended to her anyway...

3.1. The price you give up, and the reserve nobody guarantees

Selling through auction or modern auction typically costs you 10% to 15% of your home's value. On Sarah's home, that's somewhere around £30,000 to £45,000, which is a lot to pay for a quicker sale she didn't even necessarily need.

Worse, the reserve is not a promise. It's the salesperson's best guess at what your home might fetch, and they're incentivised to guess high to win your signature...

If the best bid comes in below it, or there are no bids at all, nobody makes up the difference. So the property simply doesn't sell. (The auction house doesn't pay you the rest for getting it wrong!)

If you want my full verdict on the modern method of auction, I've put everything I've seen into this video: Is the Modern Method of Auction ACTUALLY any good?

Here's how the two routes compared for her:

3.2. The buyer pool, which is the real problem

Modern auction doesn't open up a new pool of buyers for your home. It just shrinks the pool you've already got. And remember what that pool looked like:

1. A niche market. A remote village where perhaps one genuine buyer only appears every month or two.
2. A niche property. A country cottage on a road, which potentially rules out most of those rare buyers.

Put that tiny pool into a process most buyers either can't join or don't want to join, and there's a strong argument that the number of interested people just drops close to zero.

3.3. What a failed attempt leaves behind

This is the part that gets skipped in the pitch the modern auction companies give.

Set-up and a month of marketing mean bidding wouldn't have happened until nearly two months from now, in October.

Second, most agreements oblige you into another auction attempt if the first fails.

So a failed attempt would have put Sarah back at square one in mid winter, with a failed auction and a low guide price sitting in the property's online listing history.

That history is the expensive bit:

1. Buyers can see it, so it plants the "what's wrong with it?" question.
2. And they tend to read the low guide price as a verdict on what the place is worth. So asking £300,000 afterwards becomes a great deal harder if an auction failed with a guide price of £250,000.

I've covered what happens if your house doesn't sell at auction in full, because it's the scenario nobody plans for.

3.4. The £12,000 fee, and who actually gets half of it

So if Modern Auction carried all these downsides for Sarah's sale, why did she have her estate agent and the modern auction house encouraging it so aggressively?

Well, for one, the auction company carries almost no risk if the property doesn't sell. They take the photos, they put it online, and either it sells and they earn over £12,000... or it doesn't and they've lost next to nothing.

And where an estate agent introduces you to a modern auction, be aware that they'll usually take around half of that fee.

It means they can earn more from passing you on to a modern auction, than from actually selling the property themselves. This explains why homeowners saying "I'd like a faster sale" turns into estate agents saying "do modern auction" so reliably, regardless of how good a fit it actually is for the property or situation.

Top tip: Before you sign anything, ask the auction company what percentage of the properties they take on actually sell, and ask for that in writing. Sarah asked and never got a straight answer. It's a very revealing number, and most modern auction companies are actively trying to conceal how low their success rates actually are.

The lack of openness tells us a lot about how often Modern Auction fails to deliver what it promises at the outset.

So that's the machine that was pushing Sarah towards modern auction. Before we get to what I'd do instead, there are two last checks from the call...

3.5. The last checks before the prescription

The first is a check I run before saying anything about a stalled sale, and it takes about two minutes:

Count the comparable homes for sale within a few miles, then count how many have a sale agreed. For Sarah it was around 25 comparables, with about one in five sale agreed. Quiet, but not frozen. Buyers were transacting near her, at her sort of price, and that's the strongest argument there is against giving away £30,000 or more to get out.

Sarah had also half-wondered about using a house-buying company, mostly because of the letters coming through her door quoting close to her asking price. That route came off the list even faster. Genuine house-buying companies pay somewhere around 80% of market value, and any letter promising far more has a catch behind it, which I've broken down in how much house-buying companies really pay.

A property like this one works against her twice there, too. I ran my own house-buying company for years, and the model needs homes that are easy to value and quick to resell. A one-off cottage in a remote village is the opposite, so they either price that risk in (and offer even lower than usual), or they walk away entirely.

Related: Cash House Buyers: The 11 Pros & Cons (My Honest Advice Before You Sell)

A house-buying company wasn't right for Sarah. If you're weighing one up for your own sale though, I've designed a free quiz that tells you in about 60 seconds whether one genuinely fits your situation. If it does, I'll introduce you to the company I know and trust on your results page. If it doesn't, I'll let you know what I'd suggest instead.

Click below to take the quiz:

Finding more things that don't work doesn't sell the house though, so here's what I suggested.

4. How I'd sell a house like this one instead

Partway through the call, Sarah summed up exactly where she'd got to:

She was right.

But what there is instead is a stack of small moves that each reliably shift the odds in your favour.

None of them is clever on its own. But together, they're how a rare-buyer home gets sold more quickly.

Here are some of the actions I gave Sarah:

1. Add a second agent rather than replacing the first.
   Two listings on the portals with different photos, two databases of registered buyers, and two teams cross-selling the property. When the right buyer might only appear every few weeks, coverage matters more than anything else you can control.
2. Do everything at once, not in dribs and drabs.
   If you're going to tweak a few things in your approach, do them all at once. So get fresh photos, both agents live, and any price change all in the same week. The idea is to try and make one big splash, instead of 3 little ripples.
3. Choose the price by deciding which regret you can live with.
   Sarah wasn't sure how aggressively to cut her price. Too low, and she'd lose money. Not enough, and she might be here in another year. The right option's a personal decision for you, and I frame it like this: Choose which regret you can live with.
   
   Are you happy cutting hard, selling quickly, and never knowing if you'd have got more? Or holding firm into next year, knowing at least you'll end up with the top price? Sarah chose the first camp, and so is preparing to relist the property at a figure still comfortably above the auction reserve she'd been quoted.
   
   Quick one on price, and how important getting the right one is: Rightmove's July 2026 analysis shows homes that sell without needing a reduction find a buyer in around 36 days, against around 127 days for homes that need one.
4. Get the legal work done before you have a buyer.
   Pick the solicitor and complete the forms now, so the first fortnight of the sale isn't burned on paperwork while your buyer sits there nervous, and your sale immediately starts losing momentum.
5. Stay on the market through the winter.
   Plenty of people take a property off in November to relaunch in spring. If you're serious about selling, this is a terrible idea... but when you're looking for a rare buyer like Sarah was here, it's even worse. That's because while the listing is down, the chance of that rare buyer finding you is zero.
6. Set your expectations before you start.
   On Rightmove's July 2026 figures, a home that needs a price cut along the way takes around 127 days just to find its buyer, and the legal work runs on for months after that. A home with a rare buyer can take longer still. Manage your expectations in advance, and it can help you lower your stress levels, and avoid potentially rash decisions (like the Modern Auction one) later on.

That last one matters more than it looks. Sarah was days away from a £30,000 mistake, and not because the maths was unclear...

It was because nobody had helped her expect the quiet weeks. And the discomfort of not knowing when your home will sell is exactly what the modern auction pitch preys on. Set honest expectations at the start and the "rescue" offers lose most of their pull.

This plan is also just the part of a sale you can see. A lot of getting a good outcome in your sale comes down to the hundred different smaller problems that can crop up mid-sale, including the ones you don't yet know you'll hit, and handling all of that for sellers is what our accelerated sale service does if you'd rather have the whole thing done for you.

5. Where Sarah got to

She didn't sign the auction paperwork. She's lining up a second agent, relaunching everything in one go at a more competitive price, and getting her solicitor sorted in the meantime.

There was no silver bullet. But with this plan: 

• She avoids the £12,000 modern auction fee,
• She saves the gap between the auction reserve price, and the higher price the open market will be willing to pay,
• And she kept every buyer who would have been shut out of the modern auction process. Perhaps the most important part.

No magic wand, but for a sale that felt completely stuck, it's a very bad decision averted, and a series of improvements that will boost her chances of selling, and selling more quickly.

If you're somewhere near the same decision, the quiz takes about 60 seconds and tells you which route actually fits your property and your priorities. If auction genuinely is the right answer for you, I can point you to a leading auction house in your area from your results page.

If it's not (it usually isn't), I'll let you know what I'd suggest instead.

Thanks for reading, and hit the button below to get started:

Frequently asked questions

1

Is the modern method of auction a good way to sell a house that isn't selling?

If the property is rural or unique, the sale is usually stalling because there are too few potential buyers for it, and modern auction makes that worse by shutting out most of the buyers who remain. A relaunch with good local agents usually beats it, because modern auction's only real lever is a lower price.

2

How much does the modern method of auction cost the seller?

All in, expect the modern method of auction to cost you around 10% to 15% of your property's value. Part comes from selling below market value because of the method itself, and part from the big fee buyers have to pay, which they simply knock off their offer. In this consultation, Sarah had been quoted a fee of roughly £12,000 on a £275,000 property. Read more in my full guide to the pros and cons of selling at auction.

3

Is the reserve price guaranteed at modern auction?

The reserve is the lowest price you're willing to accept, not a price anyone promises to deliver. If the highest bid falls below it, or nobody bids at all, the property doesn't sell and no one makes up the shortfall. The valuation you're shown at sign-up carries no guarantee with it.

4

What happens if my house doesn't sell at modern auction?

Most agreements put the property into the next auction, so a failed attempt usually costs another month or more. The bigger cost comes afterwards: buyers can see the failed attempt and the low guide price in the listing history, and many read that guide price as a verdict on the home's value. Read more in my guide to what happens if your house doesn't sell at auction.

5

Should I use two estate agents if my house isn't selling?

Two agents give you two portal listings with different photos, two databases of registered buyers, and two teams working the property. The extra fee is usually around half a percent. It's most valuable where buyers are scarce, because the whole job there is being seen by every possible buyer.