What are you seeing on your property bee?

JonnyBravo

Mr.Brown wrote: »

What are you seeing on your property bee?

To respond to your question my answer is I am seeing the truth. Not vested interest 'reporting' of the market (either up or down), but simply a shop window reflecting genuine price movements. Instead of an endless, and quite often, pointless 'debate' about the direction of house prices - Property Bee shows what is actually happening in the market. In your market - your local area - what's been on for months / years, what's dropping, what is selling.

Whenever I have read as much puff as I can take from this board, I spend five minutes or so checking PB and it normally reassures me of my sanity.

Real properties, real price movements, real world.

That's the thing though isn't it? You sound like Ad in that you expect dropping prices on PB to mean the average selling price must be dropping.

It measures nothing of the sort. If it shows anything it is simply how far from the current reality of sale prices that sellers enter the market. ie if you're seeing large drops then delusion/optimism amongst sellers is still rife. It tells us nothing about the average selling price. Surely as a prospective buyer it is this you are more interested in?
The property bee figure just lets you know how much arguing/haggling you're likely to have to undertake to get fair value.

Mr.Brown_4

JonnyBravo wrote: »

That's the thing though isn't it? You sound like Ad in that you expect dropping prices on PB to mean the average selling price must be dropping.

It measures nothing of the sort. If it shows anything it is simply how far from the current reality of sale prices that sellers enter the market. ie if you're seeing large drops then delusion/optimism amongst sellers is still rife. It tells us nothing about the average selling price. Surely as a prospective buyer it is this you are more interested in?
The property bee figure just lets you know how much arguing/haggling you're likely to have to undertake to get fair value.

Without being disrespectful I know what it tells me. Two main things - time required to sell or stick, and price drops required. Two / three years ago every property was snapped up by BTL investors at the bottom end, and by newly rich / indebted borrowers at the higher end. Every potential reno project was gone as soon as it was listed, sometimes even before. Now I can see with my own eyes the end of the BTL market, the end of the reno market, and the nightmare that sitting in a higher end property relying on a chain must be.

I make no statement on whether this is a 'good' or a 'bad' thing, or what it means for the future - it just is the market.

JonnyBravo

Mr.Brown wrote: »

I make no statment on whether this is a 'good' or a 'bad' thing, or what it means for the future - it just is the market.

We agree on this at least.

Emy1501

JonnyBravo wrote: »

That's the thing though isn't it? You sound like Ad in that you expect dropping prices on PB to mean the average selling price must be dropping.

It measures nothing of the sort. If it shows anything it is simply how far from the current reality of sale prices that sellers enter the market. ie if you're seeing large drops then delusion/optimism amongst sellers is still rife. It tells us nothing about the average selling price. Surely as a prospective buyer it is this you are more interested in?
The property bee figure just lets you know how much arguing/haggling you're likely to have to undertake to get fair value.

LR data is up to 5 months out of date. If you are just picking random areas then PB is a waste of time. If you know your area very well then PB is a very useful tool to show market sentiment.

tomstickland

It would be interesting to see how representative this area is. I suspect that the local average is being skewed up by the fact that only the higher quality stuff is selling and all of the average to poor stuff is going nowhere.

This is an interesting question, and one that I wonder about too.

Squish_21

My property bee is showing very little change in prices and rarely any new houses added.

I guess it could be the time of the year and people thinking, oh i'll wait till after Xmas to drop the price/sell my house. Time will tell!

surreybased

Hi,

In the area we're looking at very little coming to market - anything that is reasonably priced sells quickly - usually days. If a property is on for weeks then it's often reduced - seeing 6-7% drops. Some properties hanging around for months/years and I wish there was an ignore flag on RM so that you're not presented with a list of properties that you've already ruled out.

Davesnave

I'm not seeing anything on my Property Bee now, as it's no longer relevant to me, but TBH I never really understood it.:o

Perhaps I am not that bright, but when I used it, there was little in the way of explanation and all the options and columns became a bit much. It looked like many bits of software, which may be quite brilliant in themselves, but being produced by geeks, gain little acceptance because of a poor user interface. There is simply no understanding that non-techies can't be @rsed to work it all out. Also, EAs being EAs, they had various ways of screwing it.

Saddo that I am, I felt perfectly capable of keeping all the properties that really interested me in my head. I'm not sure about others, but for me this never amounted to more than about 20 at any given time, including ones that would be of interest only if they dropped. Even now, I can accurately recall prices on places I quickly lost interest in several years ago.:o

Unfortunately, my skills don't run to remembering where I put some vital bit of paper yesterday, or which brand of washing powder we use and useful stuff like that.

Frankly, I'd find a bit of software to remove all this house price junk from my head a lot more use now than Property Bee!;)

chucky

i found property bee and property snake useful but then very limited when it came to having a huge number of properties on the side bar.

property snake allowed me to identify the property that had dropped price most and property bee helped me cut through the nonsense that estate agents tell you. some think they can make stuff up about a property thinking you know nothing about it.

an example was an agent telling me a property had only been on the market a couple of weeks - it had actually been there 3 months. property bee gives you a very good history of the marketing of the property.

tomstickland

I just use the price history information that property bee displays. I've never worked out what the hell the sidebar is supposed to do.