Getting your asking price right is crucial — especially in a slow or falling market. A survey conducted by Which? found that 46% of the 2,000 people asked sold their home for less than the amount at which the estate agent valued it.
Economists expect London property prices to fall by up to 5% this year, with only minimal growth in the southeast and east of England. The forecast is brighter for the northwest, the northeast and Yorkshire and Humberside.
So how do you know how much your home or buy-to-let is worth? Look at property portals to see asking prices for similar homes in your area; to get the values they achieved, look up the “sold price” on Rightmove and Zoopla, which use Land Registry data. Be wary of any estimations of current values.
You can track your neighbours’ sales using a free add-on for the Firefox web browser from property-bee.com. It captures listings data on Rightmove and lets you see when a seller put a property up for sale, each time they cut the price, and if it was taken off the market and put back.
Request valuations from at least three agents. Ask each to demonstrate how they have come up with the price they give, and to provide examples of comparable homes they have sold for that amount. Some may deliberately overvalue to win business, or to use your home to make other, accurately priced properties look cheap. Either way, you’ll end up having to drop the price.
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Remember that most buyers use portals, which allow you to search in round-number increments. So, if you’re trying to entice them by pricing at £799,950, your home won’t be picked up by anyone looking for properties priced over £800,000. Note, too, that anything costing £937,500 or more now attracts a bigger stamp-duty bill than it did before the system was reformed in 2014, so you may have to lower the asking price to account for this. To encourage competitive interest, quote a guide price lower than the market value.
“In any case, if the price is right, you should be getting offers within eight weeks,” says Caroline Edwards, partner and head of Suffolk residential at Carter Jonas estate agency. “If there are no bites after that, you need to have a chat.”
