£1000 of Free House Price Information Each (merged)

codger

Just (another) quick word of warning to back up cautionary posts on this thread from other MSErs.

The information provided by these house price sites is not Gospel.

I've just run a check via the link at the start of this thread on a development I know well because I live there.

It's comprised of a couple of dozen new builds around an apartment conversion of an existing 200-year-old property.

The site reports 14 properties as "not new build" when they are (or were) and four "new build" when they're not.

Hopefully this level of inaccuracy doesn't extend to the sale price data.

John_Pierpoint

Bearing in mind the above caveat, this is the most comprehensive of the house price sites IMHO, also useful for checking post codes.

https://www.zoopla.co.uk/

codger

John:

Thanks for that (have only just caught up with this thread after absence!)

Interesting site, but flawed in certain ambitions which probably aren't achievable anyway. For example:

Looking at "our" new-build development, where properties were occupied from a mid-2004 start-up date, I see that one was sold for £325k in August 2005 and another for £310k in October 2006. That's correct: the builder was anxious to get rid and so the purchaser of the second property negotiated a discount off the £325k asking price.

The significant fact here is that the two properties are absolutely identical in every respect. I know, because we nearly bought the second one and we're friends with the owners of the first one.

Sadly, Zoopla has absolutely no way of knowing -- unless it's told -- that the properties are mirror images of each other.

So in estimating today's value, Zoopla has blithely gone ahead and applied the same percentage factor to both. Thus, property A, sold originally for £325k, is today "estimated" to be valued at £29,350 MORE than property B, sold at the discounted price of £310k.

This is, of course, a nonsense. Equally, looking at our own property on the Zoopla list, the price paid for it is accurate. But we too negotiated a private discount -- and that's nigh on three years ago now, because we knew the market would crash within the foreseeable future -- whereas other buyers of three identical properties to ours did not negotiate.

Guess what?

The "estimated" value of our home today, though it has (according to Zoopla) increased, is nevertheless £19,000 LESS than the other, identical, three.

What rubbish. Each of these properties is the same and "worth" the same.

And the reality -- if such there be: candidly, I see no sign of reality in any of Zoopla's reckonings -- is that we have actually made £19,000 MORE on our property than the owners of the other three. (Well, on Planet Zoopla, anyway.)

Of course, as Zoopla states, it's a "community" site which depends upon input from users to ensure accuracy. Or, to put it another way: for its estimates to have any kind of credibility, it needs lots of people to get in touch with data (that Zoopla will have absolutely no idea if reliable or fanciful.)

We won't be contributing any info to Zoopla -- and we won't be taking any notice of Zoopla estimates, either: all the current market prices it is currently showing where our development is concerned are laughable, seeing as how they're signalling increases in market values which simply do not exist in the current, downward price spiral. Likewise, in the surrounding area (a 10-mile radius of this property) Zoopla's price estimates look like an invitation to buy the fiction rights.

As a guide to past pricing based on Land Registry figures, Zoopla seems to us to be OK (it's clearly drawing upon the same databank as the website mentioned at the start of this thread: Nethouseprices, because both of them have no purchase price details for two properties to have been sold on this development, even though those sales occurred between eight and 14 months ago -- some sort of glitch in the public records, methinks.)

But as to Zoopla's estimates, no. The methodology is blatantly simplistic. And the outcome blatantly wrong. If any users of Zoopla think it's any kind of a guide to providing them with reliable information about current market prices, they're running a serious risk of being expensively misled.

Hopefully, they'll bear in mind all the caveats posters like yourself and others have issued where this particular subject is concerned, and appreciate that just because something appears on the Internet, that doesn't necessarily mean it's Gospel.

Generali

Yoshua wrote: »

With another one and a half million due to join the dole and unable to afford their mortgages,prices can only go one way for the next two years at least.

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/...&postcount=209

The government haven`t got a clue what to do next.
Anything as bad as this,has never happened before.
Property prices rose for the past eight years,there`s no reason they can`t fall for eight years.
There will be one or two false dawns but the trend is all the way down for the next year or two.

Why have you plastered this across the sticky threads? It's not very helpful.

chucky

Generali wrote: »

Why have you plastered this across the sticky threads? It's not very helpful.

he's obviously trying to get his point across... and spam everyone

Robert_Sterling_3

Google up mouseprices.

You get a lot of information free. e.g. An estimated value for every property in the country including your own.
search by postcode etc.

There are additional facilities for professionals.

You can get the same valuation as the professionals get for about £20

I am not suggesting that it is worth paying for such a valuation.

Make your own mind up about that.

Mary_Hartnell

Google up Zoopla, it links to maps photos & "street view".
Some conveyancers seem to take a long time to register change of ownership, I don't know if this is just sloth or perhaps it delays payment of stamp duty?

Mary

PS did someone pay too much tax (and obtain too big a mortgage)?
Equally, looking at our own property on the Zoopla list, the price paid for it is accurate. But we too negotiated a private discount -- and that's nigh on three years ago now, because we knew the market would crash within the foreseeable future -- whereas other buyers of three identical properties to ours did not negotiate.

googler

The trouble with Zoopla's estimates is that they include everything - land sales, part-ownership sales, right-to-buy sales of council houses....etc etc.

In an area close to me, where the top price paid for ANY HOUSE is £295k, zoopla shows the average price as over £700k..... because the average includes the £1.75million paid for the land plot where a couple of housebuilders have now put 70-odd houses.....

John_Pierpoint

googler wrote: »

.. because the average includes the £1.75million paid for the land plot where a couple of housebuilders have now put 70-odd houses.....

What part of country is that? It looks amazingly cheap? Roughly how big was it?
Has the original seller got some sort of option on the site? How much is the average new property making when it is sold?

PhylPho

I registered with mouseprices in order to make a quick check of its accuracy / veracity in respect of the new-build development I'm on.

Mouseprices fails to accurately record what was new at the time of sale and what was not: four out of a total of 20 -- yes, it's only a small development -- are said to have been sold 'not new' when they were, in fact, purchased directly from the builder.

Two identical properties, purchased new from the builder and one year apart, have entirely different mouseprices "estimated values".

Mouseprices is yet another of the kind of website that contributes nothing to a true understanding of the UK housing market but everything in the way of traffic-generated adverts to the website's profits.

Junk.