Estate Agent Today: Rightmove Says get real on house prices.

geneer

http://www.estateagenttoday.co.uk/news_features/Get-real-on-house-prices-Rightmove-tells-sellers


Estate Agent today must surely be the most bearish site on the internet.

Its going to be funny when Hamish et al start dismissing Estate Agents as doomsters.

Get real on house prices, Rightmove tells sellers




Friday 22nd July 2011
A new campaign has been launched by Rightmove, telling sellers to get real about house prices.

It also encourages them to work with their agent to get their properties sold.

Rightmove director Miles Shipside said: “This campaign is aimed at educating the millions of current and prospective sellers who visit Rightmove each month about the realities of the current property market.

“It’s so important to price and present a property appropriately in order to have the edge in getting it sold, and we’re looking to show sellers how working with a Rightmove member agent can really help with this.”

Rightmove’s July House Price Index revealed that 70% of properties brought to market in the first six months of 2011 were still up for sale.

Despite so many properties not selling, asking prices have risen all year until this month.

Rightmove is looking to educate sellers via a campaign landing page with an informative video guide. It will also be supporting the campaign with radio and online advertising.

Shipside added: “There seems to be a mismatch at the moment between seller expectations and the realities of the current property market.

“Agents tell us that their two main challenges are motivating sellers to price realistically and attracting the right new instructions. Rightmove will be looking to assist with both these issues over the next three months.”

As part of the campaign, Rightmove is providing its membership of sales and lettings agents with some of its online property advertising products for free.

The products give increased exposure around the Rightmove website and can be resold on to potential vendors and landlords, or factored into the agent’s marketing offers.

Rightmove is currently in the process of contacting each member agent with full details about the campaign, and information about the products being credited to their account.

Shipside said: “Rightmove’s advertising products are being used very effectively by agents in their client-facing activities; as instruction winning incentives; as tools for encouraging price reductions in sales; and as rewards for valued clients and landlords in lettings.

“They can also be used as straightforward sell-on products which generate a profit for the agent. We hope that providing these products free to agents during the course of the campaign will help them capitalise on the increased consumer interest that the campaign will generate.”

If you haven’t seen the new campaign page, take a look – and check out some of the comments, too, as they might not be quite what Rightmove expected.

One person says that she cut her asking price against her agents’ wishes and comments: “Estate agents have had it too good for too long and want to become more realistic in terms of what price can be achieved in the present financial situation.”

Another says that although their agent showed some people around the house, “in the end it was us that sold our house; obviously we knew the house better than the estate agent. LOL!”

Cleaver

A new campaign has been launched by Rightmove, telling sellers to get real about house prices.

It also encourages them to work with their agent to get their properties sold.

Rightmove director Miles Shipside said: “This campaign is aimed at educating the millions of current and prospective sellers who visit Rightmove each month about the realities of the current property market.

“It’s so important to price and present a property appropriately in order to have the edge in getting it sold, and we’re looking to show sellers how working with a Rightmove member agent can really help with this.”

Rightmove’s July House Price Index revealed that 70% of properties brought to market in the first six months of 2011 were still up for sale.

Seems sensible. I've said before that the housing market around me is made up of two types of house. 25% are houses that are priced at a sensible level and sell quickly. 75% are houses that are priced at 2007 levels and have been sitting on the market since 2010, 2009 or 2008. No one will buy them as they don't represent value compared to the other 25% that are obviously priced at a level that people can afford and / or represent value.

Round my way (sorry) we know a couple just up the street on the opposite side who have had their house up for sale for over two years. They remarked to me that they are 'devastated' that it won't sell and just can't work out why. Erm... the price perhaps? Y'know, your asking price that if achieved would be a street record and is about 20% above the price being achieved for very similar houses?

StevieJ

If I was selling I would probably reference the top of the Zoopla estimate range and be ready to cut up to about 16%. I certainly wouldn't be pricing it at what I expect to achieve, everyone expects to negotiate down now, then again I wouldn't price at 2007 either. This Rightmove post just seems like a rehash of the earlier Rightmove post, that was probably Geneer as well.

Going4TheDream

Since when was it common for huge price differences to appear in the same street for similar properties, I remember my parents selling their house and the prices were all within £500 or at the very maximum £1000k different to each other , in my street now there is a difference in price of nearly £22k for two very similar houses. Total madness

geneer

StevieJ wrote: »

This Rightmove post just seems like a rehash of the earlier Rightmove post, that was probably Geneer as well.

Except it isn't and it wasn't.

Not big on fact checking eh.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Shocker....

Desperate estate agent VI with a business model reliant on high volumes tries to talk vendors into cutting prices.

Cleaver

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Shocker....

Desperate estate agent VI with a business model reliant on high volumes tries to talk vendors into cutting prices.

But surely that's the whole point of the OP? In a bouyant market where houses were selling for asking or close to asking they wouldn't need to act in this way, they could have high volumes at high prices. By actually coming out and saying (asking?) that EAs and vendors need to cut prices it's showing that houses are prices to high, or that people can't access the credit to buy houses at that price, or that people simply don't want to buy houses at that price or, most likely, a mixture of all of these.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Cleaver wrote: »

By actually coming out and saying (asking?) that EAs and vendors need to cut prices it's showing that houses are prices to high, or that people can't access the credit to buy houses at that price, or that people simply don't want to buy houses at that price or, most likely, a mixture of all of these.

No, it's only saying that it's going broke without the high volumes to sustain it's business model.

And it would quite like vendors to bail it out by knocking a third off the price of their assets to sell quicker and keep old Miles Shipside and his EA chums in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed in the boom years.

Well I for one say Miles can 'jog on'.....

Cleaver

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

No, it's only saying that it's going broke without the high volumes to sustain it's business model.

And it would quite like vendors to bail it out by knocking a third off the price of their assets to sell quicker and keep old Miles Shipside and his EA chums in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed in the boom years.

Well I for one say Miles can 'jog on'.....

Well, in terms of the bigger picture I don't see much of a future for Estate Agents or paid websites like Rightmove in the future, as I'm sure some form of very low-cost interactive Google Maps will appear where people can list their own house with photos for a tenner and say "erm, you know, I'm not sure, I'll have to check" to people they are showing round their house instead of paying some bloke in a bad tie to do it. BTW, I know Google are already doing something like this.

But I still think the OP tells you something other than Rightmove might be struggling, which is that house prices aren't / can't / won't sell at the prices they currently generally sit.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Cleaver wrote: »

house prices aren't / can't / won't sell at the prices they currently generally sit.

So what?

We all know that the vast majority of houses on the market are not available at significantly lower prices.

The majority of vendors cannot or will not sell at lower prices. The majority of potential buyers can't get a mortgage anyway. And the entire market is frozen.

But none of this will change significantly until the availability of mortgage funds at least doubles from today's levels, and it needs to triple for Rightmove and the EA's volumes to return to pre crunch levels..

It's not a house price problem, it's a bloody mortgage funding problem, and it's never been anything else.

Knocking another 10% or 20% off prices isn't magically going to make the amount of mortgage funding double or triple from today's levels to where it needs to be.

And in fact, will probably just make things worse, as we all saw just how much mortgage lending dried up last time prices fell.

Cleaver

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

So what?

We all know that the vast majority of houses on the market are not available at significantly lower prices.

The majority of vendors cannot or will not sell at lower prices. The majority of potential buyers can't get a mortgage anyway. And the entire market is frozen.

But none of this will change significantly until the availability of mortgage funds at least doubles from today's levels, and it needs to triple for Rightmove and the EA's volumes to return to pre crunch levels..

It's not a house price problem, it's a bloody mortgage funding problem, and it's never been anything else.

Knocking another 10% or 20% off prices isn't magically going to make the amount of mortgage funding double or triple from today's levels to where it needs to be.

I understand your point, and agree to an extent. But, and we'll just have to agree to differ on this one, I still feel that house prices are an issue for many. I have a friend looking to buy at the moment and she's finding what I described in my first post. Houses she really likes do come on the market and then sell very quickly because they are priced at a rate that's attractive to people. So obviously the buyers for these properties can get mortgages and have access to credit, as does my friend. But the majority of similar properties are priced at a much, much higher rate and people don't want to buy. My feeling is that this is because of price, not because of a lack of mortgages, although I full agree that this is one factor. My friend just refuses to pay 20% more for the 80% of houses on the market, because it's obvious that good houses come on at a lower rate and she'll get one of these eventually. For her, this is a house price problem, not a credit problem.

Let's say our house disappears tomorrow and I want a new house. I have good access to credit and to buy a house down our street, even at top whack, we'd only need to borrow just under 2x income. I can therefore afford, and could easily borrow, the money to buy the house for sale opposite us. But even if I loved the place, I'm not buying it as it's priced higher than the record price for our street, recorded in late 2006. That's stupid, it won't sell. And the reason it won't sell is the price, not mortgage rationing.

I understand the bigger picture, which is that if credit was eased, more people would buy houses and maybe the one over the road would be bought as the floodgates opened and people started buying again. But that may not happen. So the other option, at present, is for house prices to fall slightly. I'm basically saying that there are clearly two factors at play here.

As I say though, we can just agree to disagree on this one.