Asking price are still very high and sellers are still thinking it is 2020

[BroglieBoy]

A 3 bed house was listed in Wokingham for £700K in June this year. It was then reduced to £650K then to £600K and then very recently reduced to £550K.

House is a Probate with 2 individuals.

The house looks fine and needs some modernisation. New carpets, new decoration new kitchen units.

The house next door which is a 4-bed house was sold in June 2023 for £492K.

I would expect the estate agent to be aware of the recent sold prices in the area( in fact recent sold price of the adjacent property ) and market it accordingly.

How come the estate agent thinks they can market a property that is smaller than the adjacent property, but market it for more than the recently sold prices, especially in a falling market?

@Aloci First time buyer properties are going up in price round here. DC has just bought a flat for £170k - has exchanged, and will complete within a week. Another pretty much identical flat in the same block has just gone on the market for £185k.

@hannahcolobus i can beat that! Viewed a house last week.

was sold £525k in jan 2022. Now listed for £700k! They haven’t done any work to it at all. Madness.

@Silverbirches.What town/part of the country is that?

The property I posted is way over priced compared to similar properties (some 2 bed) that are being reduced nearby.

Bedfordshire - same sort of thing round here

Yanbu, people are pricing like it's Covid madness, but it's so expensive to borrow now and no stamp duty holiday. Where I'm looking it's probate properties priced £20k less than fully done up places when they have major structural works that need doing and it's more likely to cost £80k or more. People have lost touch of the price of borrowing and renovation imho.

So much this:

People have lost touch of the price of borrowing and renovation imho.

Also

The person who values your house is more often than not working on targets, and that is their sole role in the agency. Once they have you signed up the have no vested interest - if it never, ever sells, so what? Their targets are met and they have done their job. So they don't care if your house is 25% overpriced or not. It's a deeply flawed model, especially in the current climate.

You sound like an estate agent 😀

This is how a free market economy works, right? The house price is initially detrmined by the seller. If the buyer agrees, the sale is made. If the buyer doesn't agree, the seller (eventually) has to adjust their price, until such time as there is a willing buyer. Then that's the agreed price. The housing market in the UK would have crashed a long time ago if properties were only sold for that they were "worth" - as in land value and bricks & mortar anbd building costs.

*and building costs

Cambridgeshire border, near A1

I keep an eye on rightmove as I am planning to move in a few years (but don't have to if that makes sense).
Bought house 2019 for just under 200K. At that time 3 bed detached houses were going generally around the 190-205k mark.
During the covid boom they were selling from 230-260k.
Now they are selling around 220-240K.

I'd be happy to sell mine for what I paid for it in 2019 if everyone else did the same. If I sell mine for less and everyone else is selling for more then I have to buy a inferior house if that makes sense as my buying power is reduced.

So I sell at 200K (2019 price) but now I can't buy another 3 bed detached because everyone else wants 230k for theirs. So I either don't move or sell mine at 230k or move into a smaller house.

I'm not the seller jumping in on your post but I had a look on Rightmove and think I've found the two properties (road starting B and ending -ide"?) If they are the right ones, I'd say that the more expensive one is slightly bigger and in better condition than the one which sold in the summer.

Whether it's worth a certain price is a different question but I didn't think the price looked out of kilter as a comparison with the neighbour's house.

I love the photoshop fail on the sky in pic 13.

I agree that sometimes vendors ignore EA advice.

The house next to us (semi detached, totally derelict and needs gutting and rewiring for starters) is on the market for £1.1 million.

Everyone in our street fell about laughing.

It's a probate sale, and the beneficiaries live in Fulham. This is the rough price for their area. But not this. Miles and miles and miles and several counties away from Fulham. In one of the most economically depressed locations in the country.

If they asked circa £325 k then maybe.... but even that with all the work that needs to be done.....

Spot on.

Thatss the one you identified,
but the price still seems to be on higher side.

Cant believe they started at £700K and as a result the sellers think they have already made a big reduction.

@BroglieBoy also it doesn’t matter what the asking price is.

maybe people have got used to a rising market - in the British system it’s completely acceptable to offer under the asking price.

so if you like it I’d offer what you’d be happy to pay (or a bit less) and ask the agent to put it to the seller.

eg you could offer £500k.

They might say no.

If so you say ok we’ll leave our offer on the table and keep looking at others. In a falling market they might come back to you.

or they might say we’d accept £540

and then you say we’d go to £510

They might say £530

and so on. You either negotiate to agreement or leave your lower offer there.

why would an agent refuse a viewing? When they say the asking is XYZ you say ‘yeah maybe’

and then after the visit if you like it you say

‘well we quite liked it but it’s not worth XYZ, we’ll offer and give the number you think it’s worth.

negotiate people!

They're not a different world where I am: it's pretty identical.

Older probate houses are more likely to sell close to winter due to damp setting in and high heating costs. Also inheritance taxes become payable after a certain period of time.

Because last year a house on the same street sold for 170

I completely agree, it seems like a stand off at the moment.

We're relocating early next year and we would originally have sold but because the market is so unpredictable, we have set timescales around schools and rental prices are so high where our current house is we might not. I am already seeing that happening locally with a number of houses that were for sale now being rented instead. The upshot of very high rental prices (in my area at least) is that anything in a good condition can be rented easily if the sellers sales price isn't achieved and that's removing even more of the good stock from the market.

How do you know they didn't? Estate agents are the sellers' agents and have to act on the sellers' instructions.

Yes, but with everyone using apps like PropertyLog nowadays it has to be a genuine reason or you are going to be found out quite quickly?

A house near me went up for sale in April for 1 million, which everyone thought at the time was brave, however It went under offer within a month.
It’s obviously fallen through as it’s back up for sale today for 1.1million

Are you allowed to post a link?