Zoopla valuation wrong

[anntonia]

Hi,

Does anyone else have experience of their zoopla valuation being wrong? We live in a cheap part of the country but a desirable village, and paid £240k for our three bed terrace back in 2006.

Zoopla now values it at £220k-£305k in 2021. It has a neighbouring two bed terrace on for £380k.

We’ve not had it valued by estate agents, but going off local prices it’s ‘worth’ £400k+.

Zoopla is notoriously inaccurate. It doesn't take into account improvements etc.

I think Zoopla takes the most recent sold price then values based on the average change each period (let's say quarter for argument's sake) using the sale price of other properties in the post code. My house is in a row of 4. They are identical but all last sold at a different date, with a variation of 25 years. The price range is £100k between the 4. Utter nonsense.

But equally, when I sold my last house the estate agent was really struggling to value it because it was unique. I was surprised by the low valuation until I realised they hadn't noticed the double detached garage and home office at the bottom of the garden .

The Zoopla valuations are bang on the money round here, for 'ordinary' houses at least. Obviously they are inaccurate for anything oddball that was last sold in 1980 because there is no recent or comparable data to go off.

Our buyer offered 30k below the asking price because of the zoopla 'valuation'. If you log into zoopla you can claim your home and then there's a contact form if you believe it's valued incorrectly ; I advised them of the money we'd spent on renovations and a week later they changed the valuation to exactly the same as our asking price. So to all those people saying that buyers don't pay attention to it, some definitely do and it's worth seeing if you can get it changed.

Mine said that the house had been sold a couple years ago. And it hadn't! I've been here all along.

That freaked me out a bit.

Zoopla doesn’t work here either - street of different sized houses, many of which haven’t changed hands in 30 years. The mortgage company had to send someone out physically to value it when we remortgaged last year.

Zoopla have an issue. As has been said on here, buyers will look at other sold prices in the area, which will lead you to Zoopla, or they go to Zoopla directly. Agents use Zoopla for comparables but will have market insight that can correct any valuation discrepancy. That means that the buyer sitting at home may see your house advertised at the right price, but will be put off viewing because of their own research via Zoopla.

My own property had all its historical tracking data removed jan 2021 and was reset at the average price of the 5 bed new builds on the estate in the village. Zoopla couldn't pick up on the fact that it had 5 acres and is the 9 bedroom manor house. So they value it at around 50% of what it sold for 12 years ago before it had £500k of extensions.

It goes on the market later this year, and I am lucky because buyers will see the valuation as being clearly way off on zoopla, so I'm still likely to have the viewings. However, if Zoopla is out on your property by 20-30% that could be a perceived as real by buyers, and lead them to view the "more valuable house" in the next village rather than yours.

If you identify an issue., write to Zoopla at [email protected]

They’re very wrong I think but most mortgage company’s go off their amounts for house values. I worked as mortgage advisor and usually we went off zoopla amount unless they got a valuer

The value of a house is the amount a willing buyer will pay for it. If a nearby house comfortably sells for £380k and you put it on the market fo £410k you will definitely get interest and offers if it's genuinely that much more desirable/larger than the £380k one. It doesn't matter what zoopla says - if a house is priced even £10k lower than it's "real" value, there will be two offers and you ask them to put in a "best and final" offer, and one of them bumps up their offer by £10k because they know it's worth it and they don't want to lose out for the sake of £2k-£3k.