I was considering using them to get a valuation on a couple of properties that I am thinking of bidding on.
They give a free valuation and then a paid for valuation that "uses the same system available to estate agents".
No idea how the paid for valuation differs, so I'm just wondering if anybody has actually bought one, and whether they found it to be accurate, or at least helpful.
Any input appreciated.
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The paid for valuation is more specific but the valuation range can be kind of wide. You'd learn just as much by looking on rightmove, checking out sold prices and getting a feel for value in general. I think there is also zoopla and nethouse prices to check. I have a feeling one of those offers free valuations. The valuation is just an automated one and if there haven't been many recent property sales in the same area of a similar type then they may not be very helpful. I think I bought one for the house I am in at the moment out of curiosity but the range was something ludicrous like £150-210k as a potential value!
Most useful property tool I have found is the propertybee toolbar for firefox. It shows you the history of a property on rightmove so you can see when it went on, how much for and what has been changed.
Now with google streetview you can at least wander round an area and see what it looks like first :-)
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Mouseprice and Zoopla were within 5% of what an estate agent said my house was worth.
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>> Mouseprice and Zoopla were within 5% of what an estate agent said my house was
>> worth.
Or the estate agent said your house was worth within 5% of what the automated system said...
They're vaugely useful, but they're only as good as the data that has gone into them. The house I sold a couple of years ago is one in a terrace of 7 identical houses, and it gave values for them, iirc whereby the highest valued one was more than twice the lowest...
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Trouble is I knew before the estate agents arrived that my house would be troublesome to value - its rather er...."unique" when it comes to location, style and presentation :-)
Last edited by: Pugugly on Fri 30 Apr 10 at 09:23
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Yus! ... These sites are ok (as a guide) for a common or garden property, but not for the quaint, unique or unusual.
For that type of property, always call in a 'specialist', then stick 10k on top.
For instance - I had a unique property with extensive sea views to sell.
I called in all the common & garden agents for a valuation.
But I sold the prop. through an 'up market' agent for 45k more than the former valued it at.
Thanks for that property bee site, I'll just have to install firefox after all.
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I had three agents in - one was a national the other two locals and one was someone I'd worked with in the past. They were all within 20k of each other, I've pitched the place at price that suits my needs - I'm in no hurry to sell at the moment as my wife's property is on the market as well and one or t'other will sell sooner or later and we have a couple of properties in sight neither of which that the sale of the second property is critical for us, depending which sells first we may rent out the unsold one - not going to sell for silly money.
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>>>not going to sell for silly money.
You mean the correct price the market dictates?
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I have now thanks a nice way to find out what it's worth without roping in the estate agents.
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Sorry PU should have added a smiley. We've done a bit of property stuff during this recession period and times are interesting to say the least.
I really wouldn't think of paying anyone for a valuation Steelspark... mouseprice.com seems to want £20 for info you can esaily find/deduce online from other free sources.
After all no house has an exact value anyway. Obviously the more standard the house the easier to compare to others in the area and work out a valuation. However even with a standard house type the value of a particular house at any time is a combination of the lowest the seller will accept and the highest the buyer is willing and able to go. Of course as the house gets more unique in type then the variation in worth can be £100k or more.
You just have to give an individual house a punt and see what happens.
We are looking to move ourselves plus buy a project so have been following the market closely for 6mths. With Rightmove and other resources at your fingertips you have pretty well the same info the agents do. A massive advantage over the pre-internet age where agents held all the cards.
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>> Most useful property tool I have found is the propertybee toolbar for firefox. It shows
>> you the history of a property on rightmove so you can see when it went
>> on how much for and what has been changed.
>>
>> Now with google streetview you can at least wander round an area and see what
>> it looks like first :-)
Thanks Teabelly. Yes, I have already been using PropertyBee and find it very useful, it is fascinating to see the history of some houses. I have seen ones that started at almost 800K, waited six months, then went to 750K, waited another three months and went to 700K, and have recently come down to 650K.
A combination of hopeless optimism and probably also agents that are happy to go along with it. Certain agents seem to be particularly guilty of whacking on huge markups (or at least taking on properties were the owners have suggsted such markups), whereas others seem to get it pretty close (judging by the fact that the properties they markets generally go quickly, whereas the overpriced ones are there for month after month).
As for streetview and nethouseprices, I am on them for about 3 hours a day! :) Here is my routine:
1) Find a house on rightmove
2) Google the street
3) Streeview it to find the actual house
4) Open in Google Earth, to measure plot
4) Get the postcode (royalmail website)
5) Put it into nethouseprices and find close properties that sold
6) Look up the close properties on Google Maps to see if they are similar
7) Google Earth to measure plot again
8) Pull hair out and weep silently
9) Repeat...
Last edited by: SteelSpark on Fri 30 Apr 10 at 11:45
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You forgot 10 - buy a house that looks and feels OK within your budget.
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>> You forgot 10 - buy a house that looks and feels OK within your budget.
Well, when I get there I'll add it! :)
The thing is, what feels right to me, has to be somewhat based upon what others are prepared to pay. Would be very easy to pay 100K more than anybody else would be prepared to pay for the property, so eventually I will end up 100K worse off than I would have been if I get it that wrong. Either because I could have had 100K less of a mortgage, or because when I sell it my profit will be 100K less.
There is a property that I am interested in, that seems good, and which has come down 25K from the originally asking price, and which might go for an offer which is another 30K lower.
It seems like a good house to me, good area, decent transport links, good schools, ticks most of the boxes, is (just) within budget, and the price to me seems reasonable, but it is not being inundated with offers (only mine and one other that was 5K higher and got rejected) after being on for over 3 monyhs. So, if I buy it, and then need to sell it eventually, I would expect that it again would not fly off the shelf.
As I mentioned, other properties are going very quickly, that to me also seemed to be priced accurately. So, if there are two properties with no obvious faults that I both think are priced accurately, one of which goes after a few days and one which is on for months then perhaps my judgement of what is a good price is wrong on the latter.
I might just rent for life :)
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I might just rent for life :)
That's actually not a bad option - everyone knew that the property market was overcooked and that there were going to be casualties - UK is obsessed with ownership which is part of the problem caused by the Banks/Government a couple of years ago.
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>>>I might just rent for life :) That's actually not a bad option...
We thought hard about the rental option too. However we rented for a year before we found this place and I hated the monthly rental far exceeding the interest on invested balance.
Currently I reckon we'd have a 30-40% shortfall over a year between the cost of renting a replacement and the return on our house sale value invested.
Unless I'm missing something...?
One another angle we've been happliy established here for 16yrs now and stepping into the buy/sell world again is not a prospect I relish.
Last edited by: Fenlander on Fri 30 Apr 10 at 12:38
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Plenty of cheap new builds in Ireland for €low money.
Lemme know if you're interested, I might be able to get you a bargain? :)
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What you get for yours and what you pay is irrelevant. What matter is how much it costs to change!
If you find somewhere you like, seller accepts your offer and the surveyor agrees then you haven't paid too much. Surveyors are also down valuing like crazy still so even if you want to buy and it is a reasonable price then you can find they scupper the deal anyway.
Different agents mean premium property though. Ones through Knight Frank or Strutt & Parker are going to have a different clientele than Smith and co down the road. What seems over priced to one person might be cheap to another and vice versa.
If you don't have to sell then you can wait for that person that thinks your house is worth what you think it is not what an agent says. It's all a game anyway. Agents value from other agents which is how bubbles occur as you get someone drifting from the average and they all see it sell so they follow. Works in bubbling prices up and bubbling them down.
You're worrying too much anyway. If you find something you like at a price you can afford then if it is a home then it isn't so bad that you may have over paid a bit. Whenever you buy there is that anxiety as to whether you could have done better but as anyone that has bought anything knows, you always see it cheaper just after you've bought! I probably over paid on the first house I bought. Don't know whether I did the same on this one as I got it in 2008. It was a repossession so going cheap, relatively, but that doesn't mean it is necessarily worth more than I paid for it now. But it's a home and the mortgage is much less than the rent would be on a flat!
Last edited by: teabelly on Fri 30 Apr 10 at 18:00
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...But it's a home...
Wise words.
I think some people get too bound up in the market and the deal.
My words to myself when I was buying Ifithelps Towers were: "Just get it bought."
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>>Ifithelps Towers
I
Are you open to the general public this weekend?
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...Are you open to the general public this weekend?...
No.
The drive's a bit weedy, there's a leak in the roof in the west wing, and I had to let the third footman 'go' a little while ago.
But times are not quite so hard that I have to let the hoi polloi tramp over the Axminster.
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>>No.
Looks like it's Chatsworth again, then.
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...Looks like it's Chatsworth again, then...
Ah, Devonshire, decent enough cove, but he's let the old place go a bit 'trade' for my liking.
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>> But times are not quite so hard that I have to let the hoi polloi
>> tramp over the Axminster.
>>
Shag pile much preferred Dear Boy!!
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>> What you get for yours and what you pay is irrelevant. What matter is how much it costs to change!
My thoughts too! We sold our house in December and it's taken until now to find one in budget and we liked it. Well the one we had an offer accepted for and still hadn't moved 4 months later...
Unless you can sell and don't need to buy at all then it's not money that you can really use is it. It's down to cost to change. And we managed to downsize so cost of new house covered including stamp duty etc. We're quite lucky I suppose. I suppose if we'd moved to a cheaper area we could have money left over but we want to live in a particular area.
I do wonder if we've over paid but there isn't much on the market where we're looking. But the surveyor valued it and it seems we haven't. Moving into a home instead of 'renting' makes sense too - we don't have a mortgage so we will save month on month once we move in to the new house.
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Every estate agent I've been involved with regarding to valuations (not my property incidentally) has provided one on the spot and, in the case of each property, different agents delivered varying figures.
Anybody who basically relies on commission for a living will provide the maximum figure they can hopefully get away with, relying on people's greed.
I've always suspected, in fact, that a large reason for the ever rising house prices earlier in the decade was these type of valuations, especially as mortgages were so easy to obtain.
Last edited by: Stuartli on Sun 2 May 10 at 15:57
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I used to be registered with MousePrice but I checked out a few properties that I know locally and I wouldn't rely on their valuations.
I'm now into firefox & property bee though, thanks to teabelly - see, ya can teach an old Dog new tricks :)
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Anybody used MousePrice.com - teabelly
