Who's right estate agents or internet price guides?

phoebe1989seb

murphydog999 wrote: »

The one that is £516K was last sold in 2000 for £190K. There is no mention of the house being extended, and (in my opinion) it needs an update. It's on a big plot with a great garden, onto open countryside, but a £300K increase???

Obviously I don't know where these houses are situated, but on the South Coast we bought a house (in need of major renovation and conversion back to a single dwelling from four flats) in 1997 for £117,500 and sold it in 2007 for just shy of £600k. It's a very desirable area generally and since then prices only appear to have fallen very slightly, although no houses in the road have come on the market since.

Whilst prices have obviously dropped in most areas more recently, I guess the sellers of the houses you are looking at will still expect a substantial increase on what they paid over ten years ago.

I totally agree that it's really hard to work out what these individual properties are worth though......we always buy the ones with few comparables and struggle to gauge their value

googler

For a long while, Zoopla showed the average price of a few streets near me as £400 - 450,000. This is in an area where a 2-bed ex-council fetches £125k or so, and where new-builds constructed in the last 4 years have 4-bed detacheds at around £250k.

The average figure on Zoopla had factored in the sale of the land where the new-builds had been built, at £1.75 million or some such figure.

They've corrected it now.

hazyjo

Ignore 'valuations' from internet sites - especially when nothing nearby has sold recently.

We bought an 8 year old house. 'Valued' on zoopla at £700k+. We paid £435k. The people before us had bought it new for £400k all those years ago. Zoopla obviously just added the average selling percentage increase to what they paid in early 2000s. Nothing in our street had sold in that time so no other comparables for zoopla to take into account.

It's now showing the value at pretty much what we paid.

We did get a good deal, but there's no way it's worth over £500k.

Jx

abaxas

Both are about as accurate as council employee's time sheet.

kingstreet

Go and view.

If you like it, offer what you think it's worth to you.

That's always stood me in good stead over the years. Back in 1988 when I bought for the first time there was no Zoopla etc.

Gra76

I've found internet price guides such as Zoopla to be wildly inaccurate. I don't pay them the slightest bit of attention. You can't rely on anything that guesses at prices based on postcode unless all the houses are identical and in the same state of repair.