Estate agents who overprice properties cost sellers £4.3bn

At Mark Beaumont, we take property pricing very seriously. We want our clients to sell for the best price but pricing too high can put off buyers. We provide free no-obligation valuations and our experts can give you accurate pricing based on local selling markets and the strength of the market within your area.

According to Which estate agents who routinely overvalue properties are potentially leaving many homeowners worse off as they can be forced to make huge price cuts to sell their property, a new Which? investigation has found. Which? analysed hundreds of thousands of property sales in England and Wales between September 2015 and 2016, and found that one in five properties (19%) had to be heavily reduced – meaning the initial asking price was reduced by 5% or more before they sold. We calculate that unrealistic and overinflated valuations could be potentially losing sellers as much as £4.3bn, and significantly slowing down the time it takes to sell a property.

 Bloated valuations can harm your property profits When you want to sell your home, It may be tempting to choose the estate agent that values your property at the highest price. However, the results of our investigation suggest that while it may seem like agents are doing a favour by trying to get more for your home, the property can end up selling for much less than average. We compared listing prices with sale prices for more than 370,000 properties sold in the 12 months to September 2016 to see which agents had cut the initial asking price of properties in order to sell them. We found that an estimated one in five (19%) of all properties sold in England and Wales had to be reduced by at least 5% in order to sell, which we classified as ‘heavily reduced’ in value. For properties that were not heavily reduced before selling, Which? found that the average listing price was £261,000, before an average sale price of £260,000. For properties that were heavily reduced, the average listing price was £266,000, before an average sale price of £241,000, potentially leaving the seller £20,000 worse off.

We believe that the practice of overinflating the price of a property when it is listed is potentially losing sellers £4.3bn a year. What’s more, this tactic could be slowing down the sale of your home. We found that heavily-reduced properties took on average 64 days longer to sell than all other properties.

Info courtesy of Which