What do you make of this?

[holidaybug]

There is a house up for sale by us for over £600k. When looking on Rightmove, I found that it sold for £410k when new, then sold for £175k in 2006.

It would clearly be worth over £500k in 2006 - is this a mistake or is there something fishy here????

Ours has a misleading sales figure on those websites - not in the realm of the figures you're talking about, but there was a weird transaction a few years back where the house seemed to have belonged to two people and one sold their bit, so the sale price on record is only around 100k whereas the house as a whole is still worth a lot lot more. But a look at the sites wouldn't give that info and it'd just seem odd.

Nb - "one sold their bit" to the other owner. So it was never two flats or anything, just an unusual set-up regarding ownership. Or maybe it's not that unusual after all?

a divorce and one side bought the other out?

Our neighbours bought their house from a relative, the price paid doesn't bear much relation to the actual market value. However I thought there was a limit to how far you could stretch this, so for example, you can't sell a house for £1 to avoid inheritance tax. The difference between £500k and £175k sounds a bit too big to be ignored.

This is a large modern detached house - maybe one party sold out - not sure!

repossession sold at short notice at auction?? Seems very cheap though

I think you can sell a property for whatever price you choose to can't you?

Unlikely to be a repossession - banks are obliged to get the best price they can. You can't sell a house for substantially less than it's worth to avoid taxes. Perhaps it is a divorce settlement

Have you checked the land registry site too? RM may just be wrong!

Could it have been in a state of total disrepair when bought for the lower price?

Ask the estate agent

could they have had a fire or something?

Hi, it would have been nearly new when bought at that price. There was a house by us that had been torched a few years ago and whilst it sold for a lower price, it was nowhere near that reduction in price.

The house attached to ours sold for hundreds of thousands less than ours in the same year - because it was inherited by siblings, one of whom then paid others off.

Divorce and one party bought the other out of the house. This is how the figures look on my old house too, exactly for that reason.

A divorce, my SIL's house looks like this too, although nowhere near those type of figures but we know the price she paid to buy him out and it matches.