Sarah Beeny isn’t the first person to have thought of cutting out estate agents by allowing people to sell their homes online. But that didn’t put her off.

‘I looked at other websites that were around and thought how rubbish they were, to be quite honest,’ says the straight-talking host of TV shows Property Ladder and Streets Ahead.

Her own effort, Tepilo.com, is a joint venture with web design company Codegent. She insists it’s not about putting estate agents out of business, but about giving consumers a choice.

‘There will always be a place for estate agents. I absolutely think they serve a purpose, a lot of them understand the market very well. But this is an option for people who don’t want to pay – especially in difficult times when you may have to take less for your house than you’re comfortable with.’

A typical agent’s fee of 2.5 per cent of the value of your home would amount to £10,000 on a property valued at £400,000. ‘If you haven’t got the money to spare, you can sell your home yourself, though it is a bit more hassle: you will have to arrange viewings, for instance,’ says Beeny.

Tepilo follows hot on the heels of another venture, CompletingChains.com, which is no longer live. Beeny got involved with that last year after someone approached her ‘with a fantastic idea’ – a tool to help estate agents construct “chains” of buyers to facilitate deals being done. The trouble was, agents didn’t want to know.

‘I was really disappointed by how unwilling they were to embrace new technology and [use something] that benefits the person selling. They are much more concerned about losing their data. So that was the nail in the coffin really,’ says Beeny. It seems estate agents have only themselves to blame for the direction she then took. ‘CompletingChains is why we ended up with Tepilo, though it was an idea that had been ticking away in the back of my mind for two or three years,’ she explains.

Housing Boom and Bust

Beeny’s fame is built, to a large degree, on the housing boom that came to an abrupt end last year. The TV shows she fronted capitalised on public interest in the property market, which reached fever pitch in 2006 and 2007. Even Beeny has to agree it was a ‘slightly mad situation’, though she doesn’t subscribe to the doom-and-gloom school of thought either.

‘There are a lot of horror stories out there that have people transfixed with fear but actually if you look at [house] sales, they may be down 30 per cent now but they were up almost that much in the 12 to 18 months before the crisis moment with Northern Rock,’ she argues.

Beeny is not someone to dwell on the dark side of life. She’s too busy for one thing – with three kids and one more on the way, her own property investments, television and now Tepilo to worry about. As if that wasn’t enough, she also fronts a dating website called MySingleFriend.com which aims to match couples on the basis of their friends’ recommendations.

Though Beeny has never tried online dating herself (‘I met my husband before the internet’) she brings to the project a lifelong enthusiasm for matchmaking. After her mother died when she was a child, she played Cupid to her father and stepmother, who celebrated their 25th anniversary this year.

‘The web is a tool to make people’s lives better’

‘I had this idea, wouldn’t it be great to get everyone else’s single friends together with my single friends – but in a really non-embarrassing way,’ she explains, then adds with a chuckle, ‘The biggest part of it is girls who like putting single men on the site – because you know how it is, some men really look like they need helping.’

Like Tepilo, MySingleFriend is free from advertising and you certainly don’t get the sense this is a money-spinner for Beeny (though it has to pay for its 20-strong staff from users’ subscription fees).

‘MySingleFriend is overwhelmingly rewarding. It comes back to what we’re trying to do with Tepilo: the internet is a fantastic tool to make people’s lives better for not much effort.’

She has seen evidence of this after meeting married couples who were introduced on her site, and even a baby resulting from one of those liaisons – an encounter that she admits left her moist-eyed. ‘After that I don’t care what anyone says about the site,’ she says.