What price did a house actually sell for?

sonsbear

I've started house hunting and finding that house prices even in one street can vary quite a bit.

I would like to know if there is a way of finding out what actual houses have sold for in an area so that I know how to pitch my offers.

Any other handy internet tools I can use to find out more information about properties or what is happening in an area, etc?

cuthbert_the_octopus

http://www.houseprices.co.uk/

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/

I also use propertybee with Firefox to track property that is currently on the market.

juliescot

nethouseprices.com is another

clutton_2

www.rightmove.co.uk - house prices or sold prices i forget whihc

mynameisdave

you can also get them on https://www.email4property.co.uk

themanbearpig

I think all those sites show the initial agreed price, but if renegotiation occured after the survey, it doesnt show the reduced price. Im not 100% sure about this, so someone should correct me if im wrong.

mynameisdave

I can only confirm on my own price, but it had no renegotiation so can't say one way or the other. I offered in November and completed in March and it went on the sites in June which leads me to think it is the completed price as 8 months to get an initial offer onto the site seems excessive.

Running_Horse

themanbearpig wrote: »

I think all those sites show the initial agreed price, but if renegotiation occured after the survey, it doesnt show the reduced price. Im not 100% sure about this, so someone should correct me if im wrong.

How would they get hold of the initial agreed price in a private agreement? I always thought these websites got hold of prices based on actual stamp duty paid. What these figures don't tell you is what improvements/extensions have been made subsequently, or how local factors may have depressed demand for that road. Knowing what a house sold for in 2002 is not much use when deciding what it is worth to you today with your particular budget.

sonsbear

Running_Horse wrote: »

How would they get hold of the initial agreed price in a private agreement? I always thought these websites got hold of prices based on actual stamp duty paid. What these figures don't tell you is what improvements/extensions have been made subsequently, or how local factors may have depressed demand for that road. Knowing what a house sold for in 2002 is not much use when deciding what it is worth to you today with your particular budget.

And that has been the difficulty with a couple that I've been interested in because of the extension later but it does give me an idea of what price other houses in the road have sold for.

I've seen two houses in one road £30,000 difference (£255,000 and £285,000) but seems little reason why - one is slightly better presented but one house only needs a paint job - it is nothing major so a lot of money difference for a paint job.

I would like to know what other houses in road have sold for so if I make an offer it is not at the wished for price but rather what it is more realistically worth.

When vendors put their house up it is usually for the highest valuation they've been given which can vary considerably. The £255,000 might have been on at £285 originally and after a few months they dropped it whereas the £285 might have just gone on optimistically. I suppose vendors can but try.

On my house I've got one valuation at £330 and another at £375!

keith969

themanbearpig wrote: »

I think all those sites show the initial agreed price, but if renegotiation occured after the survey, it doesnt show the reduced price. Im not 100% sure about this, so someone should correct me if im wrong.

The price are Land Registry prices so it is the price the house sold for on completion.

Framps

These sites do use the Land Registry data (i.e. the final price paid) and are a useful guideline but as sonsbear says it's not that straightforward.

It is definitely easier if all the houses are of the same original style, at least you then have a rough starting point. Google streetview makes this quite easy for London as you can quickly find the house in question, for other towns I guess you will need to do it the old-fashioned way!

Online aerial maps, such as Google / Microsoft Earth, will show you if the house currently has an extension. A lot of councils now have online search tools for planning applications - lean-to extensions do not need planning permission but all solid-construction ones will. This will tell you what year the extension was built and thus whether it was included in the sale price that you have seen.

Condition is the great unknown; if you are incredibly lucky then you may be able to find the original EA site using http://www.archive.org/web/web.php. It's basically an internet archive - it doesn't hold every single page from a website but it holds many. I found a couple of houses on an old EA site in my search - you have to play with the criteria and it can be a bit fiddly but can yield very useful information. Depends how much effort you want to put in.

If houses are of the same style, then you can usually make some inferences around condition - particularly when two, seemingly identical houses are sold around a similar time for vastly different prices. This is no guarantee, as there may be some other reason (e.g. intra-family transfer), but generally it is condition. You only need one such situation to begin tracking as you then have a starting point, which you can then track over the years - this is easier to do by way of a chart, but you can do it with just the numbers. If you've got enough data whack a trendline on it and you will very quickly see any outliers. It's very assumptions-based but I say, is a good guideline, particularly if you can find evidence of poor- and standard-condition houses. If nothing else it is interesting to see how the road/s in question has fared over the years in terms of price fluctuations.

The last thing that is worth saying is that you may as well begin storing brochures + key details of properties that you are currently looking or those that have gone under offer / sstc recently. You can then track these through to see what they were actually sold for using the websites mentioned in previous posts (I use mouseprice.com myself). You then have the huge advantage of knowing the condition of the house, with pictures to help jog yer memory + the actual sold price to give you an indication of recent market movements. We started this halfway through our search and wished we had done this at the beginning as it yielded invaluable information.