The most recent articles on the property market have focused on the accuracy of guide prices when deciding to sell your property. Analysis of 37,000 sales by Which? found that 20% of properties that listed and went on to sell had to reduce the initial guide price by more than 5% costing the seller of this surveys average sale price of £260,000, £20,000 because those 20% ended up achieving less than the property’s true worth. These properties took an extra 64 days to sell too. Estate agents are held responsible for this.
Rightmove, the portal, released a bulletin about this too stating that sellers are 40% more likely to sell if priced correctly from launch. They also comment on price sensitivity in the market and how website traffic will quickly move on from properties that they perceive to be over priced even if only by a few percentage points.
This shows just how important accurate pricing can be in terms of time in the market and accordingly financially. Many sellers will have based their onward plans and perhaps purchase on the accuracy of the anticipated sale price and so the estate agent has a moral and ethical responsibility to show extreme due diligence when giving their opinion. With so little coming to market, the less scrupulous agent will pump the figure to win the business and then manage the price down over time…which according to Which? could be an enormously costly policy for the seller.
With an enviable ‘98% of guide price’ statistic for sales that we have completed over the last 12 months and over 80% of the sales we agree going on to complete, we have shown that we take our role as price setters extremely seriously and would never knowingly mislead our clients where the consequences are so great.
Patrick Glynn-Jones