October, 2022
One of the most agonising decisions when selling your home is what price to put it on for. Marketing your home too high and you might not sell it, market it too low and you might get far less than you should.
What price to sell your house for is one of the biggest financial decisions you are going to make. Working out how much your home could sell for is as much art and luck as science. Once you have done everything you reasonably can to make the house more appealing to buyers, you then need to stack the odds in your favour by doing your homework. Remember, it is you, not the estate agent, who decides the price at which to put the property on the market.
Whilst these are not always accurate, they give you a rough idea based on similar houses that have sold recently. You can use our online instant valuation tool or Zoopla’s online valuation and see how they compare. Bearing in mind the online valuation tools do not take into consideration extensions, conversions or the condition of your home.
Estate agents usually rely on house sales statistics from sources such as Rightmove and the Land Registry to give the price estimation. This is fine as a starting position but do not necessarily give an insight into local variations in house prices, including factors like local school catchment areas.
Local estate agents have good local knowledge, but they sometimes suggest an unrealistically high valuation in order to win your business. Once instructed, after a few weeks of little interest, you’ll be faced with having to reduce your asking price. Choose an estate agent based on their track-record of achieving asking price, an indication that they are more realistic about price.
When you’re trying to work out what price you should sell your house for, you need to become an expert on local house prices – both how much houses have sold for, and how much they are on the market for. If you are going to compare houses that are currently on the market, best to stay away from ones that have been on the market for a long time, this usually suggests they are overvalued.
Looking at local house price trends can also be helpful in working out what price to sell your house for. House prices have generally been rising over the past year.
There continues to be a shortage of properties available for sale and, though there are early signs of buyer demand softening, it remains a sellers market with properties for sale being snapped up quickly.
Once you are sure there is nothing else to learn about what price you should sell your house for, you need to decide what strategy you use for selling it. Your estate agent will have experience of what works locally, and you should certainly listen to their advice – but you should not feel compelled to accept it. A big factor though is how quickly you want to sell.
If you need to sell quickly – probably because you are already committed to moving elsewhere – then you have a couple of options:
Remember, that an offer is not legally binding, so you do not have to accept any of them
If you can take your time, you should not feel pressured to sell at a price you are unhappy with. You can take two basic approaches:
If you have a bit more time to sell, you can start high, but be prepared to go lower. If you sell at a high price, great. If you do not, then you can slowly reduce the price until you do sell. You will have thoroughly tested the market.
The danger of this approach is that if the house sits on the market a long time, it might become blighted in the mind of potential buyers, asking “what is wrong with it?”
You could reduce this risk by taking it off the market for a while and then start afresh a bit later. You can obviously only do this if you have a lot of time.
Start low, attract attention, and try and get a bidding war going, with purchasers bidding each other up. This obviously works best in a hot market with lots of willing buyers and few properties for sale.
If you are looking for a property expert who can give you a rough idea of what your home might be worth in today’s market, please call the team on 0121 430 4448 or email us on enquiries@hshomesofsolihull.co.uk.
