Pricing strategy - what price to list at?

julicorn

Hi everyone, 

After years of trawling through Rightmove you'd think I'd have this down, but now the time has come to sell our flat I'm just confused. 

The flat we're selling is a 1 bed flat with a garden in Brighton/Hove, we bought it for £270k in 2017 (offer accepted in May, survey in June, completed in December). We've changed a lot of things, but nothing structural - just paint, new floors, new kitchen doors/worktops, painted the front, that sort of stuff. Nothing that would intrinsically change the value I wouldn't think. 

We had 4 estate agents round who valued as follows:
EA1: would list at £325k, with the expectation to sell for less than that (he said 'offers over £300k' could also work, but recommends the approach of £325k. Clearly cares about Rightmove bands)
EA2: would list at 'offers over £315k', expecting to get a little more
EA3: the outlier - would list at offers over £350k, harped on a lot about buyers from London
EA4: would list on Rightmove as £300k because search bands, and then state a guide price of £300-325k. 

I ended up commissioning EA4 because I had the best feeling about them based on the person I talked to, as well as having similar properties listed. Even £300k seemed like a decent amount to me. Now I've checked the house price index calculator (Nationwide), they're actually showing over £320k...

My question - what would you list at, if you were me? I've got a feeling the EA we're going with puts more emphasis on the Rightmove bands than might be justified in the current climate (there are not that many flats coming on the market right now, and everyone I know who's looking is searching more by recency than by highest to lowest). I'm just a bit concerned we might be anchoring expectations a little lower than we need to, with people paying more attention to the '300' than the guide price range. 

Any thoughts welcome, thanks in advance!

GDB2222

I don’t know the local market, but I would underprice. What you want is a queue of buyers competing with each other.

julicorn

GDB2222 said:

I don’t know the local market, but I would underprice. What you want is a queue of buyers competing with each other.

Thank you, that is really helpful. All of them recommended having some form of open day (either advertised as such or just lots of appointments on the same day), with the view to creating that competition (seems like open days atm around here easily get 10-20 slots booked up). It makes sense to get as many people as possible interested then I suppose, i.e. price lower...

Ramouth

I would list at the price you want.  If you go for offers over you may find that the buyers mortgage valuer values it at that figure.  So you may get an offer of £320k but then have a buyer trying to gat you back down to £300k.  I am not a valuer so may be wrong about this but we don’t hear of them valuing over list price very often.

julicorn

Ramouth said:

I would list at the price you want.  If you go for offers over you may find that the buyers mortgage valuer values it at that figure.  So you may get an offer of £320k but then have a buyer trying to gat you back down to £300k.  I am not a valuer so may be wrong about this but we don’t hear of them valuing over list price very often.

The potential for down-valuation was one of the main reason I didn't want to pitch it too high, but that's an interesting point. Do you think banks would generally view the list price to be the guide price band (300-325) or the single figure that shows up on Rightmove? 
('the price you want' is I guess the tricky bit, I would have been pretty happy with 300k until all these EAs came through the door with their wild evaluations )

Hedgepigs

I'd not set too much reliance on the Nationwide Price Index either. It's overestimated the value of the house I'm buying by around 10%

getmore4less

The flat we're selling is a 1 bed flat with a garden in Brighton/Hove

AS a seller I would do a more like this the day I decided to sell and monitor closely.

have to start late
Todays more like this.
1bed flats forsale/SSTC

0-290	182/428
0-300	215/482
0-325	234/519
0-350	245/546
0-400	261/559
0-max	275/569

Can narrow that a bit for more specific area  but there is plenty of choice even at the top end of prices.

There are 130 that are SSTC £300k+  do some comparisons with those to find the pecking order

300-max

87/130

you also have the sold through prices to compare with.

julicorn

getmore4less said:

The flat we're selling is a 1 bed flat with a garden in Brighton/Hove

AS a seller I would do a more like this the day I decided to sell and monitor closely.

have to start late
Todays more like this.
1bed flats forsale/SSTC

0-290	182/428
0-300	215/482
0-325	234/519
0-350	245/546
0-400	261/559
0-max	275/569

Can narrow that a bit for more specific area  but there is plenty of choice even at the top end of prices.

There are 130 that are SSTC £300k+  do some comparisons with those to find the pecking order

300-max

87/130

you also have the sold through prices to compare with.

Thank you, that is a really useful way of looking at it. 

Within half a mile of where we are, it's looking like this:

0-290 36/86
0-300 46/102
0-325 49/116
0-350 51/127
0-400 54/134


Going through the listings is quite interesting. 325 would get us to compete with flats that are often a bit bigger, but usually don't have a garden. 300 looks a bit more like our flat overall, although again most don't have gardens (the handful that do are lower ground floor/basement, ours is raised ground floor which many prefer). 

I get the listing at 300 or 325 though now - hardly anyone seems to list anything at the price points in between around here. 

julicorn

I just wanted to say thanks again everyone for the advice. We went live yesterday, guide price £300-325k, with the listing appearing as £300k on Rightmove. We already got 9 viewings booked for the 'open day' next Saturday within the first 24 hours of going live, so that's nice to see. I'll update again after the open day, because it's always nice to get closure on a thread

jenni_fer

Great news! Looking forward to hearing about all the offers

julicorn

jenni_fer said:

Great news! Looking forward to hearing about all the offers

Thanks so much - fingers crossed!