Never sold a house before. Currently living in Germany and trying to sell my house in the UK. It rented it out when I first moved abroad but have since decided to sell. It's priced to sell (i.e. offers over as opposed to offers in the region of).

What's a reasonable viewings / offer ratio? So far I have only had 1 offer and it was about £10K below what I wanted.

Estate agent keeps saying there are more viewings lined up, the market has become buoyant again and a decent offer is just round the corner. But they are now outside of their initial exclusivity period, so they would say that, wouldn't they?

Someone from an auction house tried to convince me to put it up for auction saying they would pay all fees associated with the sale and transfer, but they wanted to set a ridiculously low reserve and lost interest when I insisted on a higher one. It was blatantly an attempt at generating quick fees for them by flogging it as cheaply as possible.

What are people's experiences of selling a house, is it normally such a pain in the ass?

We accepted 6 offers before completing the sale of our house. No issues with our house, but our buyers or their buyers were unable to complete due to problems with their surveys or failing to get a mortgage for the full amount. In one case a buyer further down the chain didn't realise that he couldn't get a buy to let mortgage on the same terms as a conventional mortgage. One sale collapsed a week before exchange of contracts when the buyer at the bottom of the chain pulled out without giving an explanation.

We had lots of interest, but it still took over 2 years to complete. Nightmare.

Unfortunately, yes.
It is pretty rare these days to sell a house quickly unless it's in a real hot spot like Kensington and Chelsea etc.
It's not a seller's market ... and is only a buyer's market for those who have a large deposit handy.
The banks/building societies are very cautious about future price falls so usually won't offer the full amount, they want the buyer's deposit to cover the risk of a possible price fall into negative equity.

I'm in the process of buying my first house and have found it relatively painless to date. It does help that the vendor is moving into a property that he currently lets so we're only waiting for that letting agreement to finish and it should be plain sailing.

The most difficult part is the poor performance of the mortgage company. To say the people I speak to at said company work solely in the mortgage department, they seem completely unaware of standard terms such as valuation and conveyancing. They wouldn't believe we had a deposit until it was deposited into our current account even though it was in one of their savings accounts, which I couldn't understand.

Selling on an offers over basis is good but only if the agent can handle selling that way.

They need to make sure the purchaser has the funds to pay what you looking to accept and not the price the house is marketed at.
Unfortunately the majority of agents are unable to do this as they get giddy the minute somebody wants a viewing and forget about making sure someone is proceedable to buy.