Rightmove seems to be populated with houses that never shift!

[FenellaBestwick]

I've been looking at houses in Wales in a few specific areas and the same houses are listed that I looked at last summer -only they now say they're newly listed. No they're not, I was still seeing them through xmas. Are Rightmove short of properties to list? Do they just keep old photos up? I could understand seeing one or two properties I knew about before, but I see loads. There appears to be very little turnover.

People will sometimes take properties down and then relist them to make them pop up again. Think it’s individuals or estate agents doing this rather than rightmove. I walk past houses every day that have been for sale for months or even a year. It’s a slow market

Same in our area. Newly listed because they have relisted with a different agent, after little interest, or reduced because they’re not shifting.
Having just had EA to ours for an appraisal I can see why. Two of them hugely overvalued, with a view to getting £10k lower. Crazy, We are on our 4th house and have never been encouraged to over price before. I don’t want my listing on RM with no interest for weeks before having to reduce it.
I’m choosing not to list because there simply isn’t anything worth buying atm.

No they don’t keep old photos up - if a house is under offer it will say STC, and sometime after completion I think it will say it’s been removed.

Did you view any of those houses last summer? If not, go and see them all anyway! You never know.

Our house sold unexpectedly quickly. It was priced sensibly but we accepted a lower offer from a chain-free buyer after some negotiation. We’d seen one house we quite liked but it went to FTBs. So we arranged to view every non-period property in our chosen area and budget, even though none looked right from the adverts, just to start having a look at some stuff.

The second house we viewed was newly listed with a different agent for slightly less than before. The photos made it look awful. I remember saying to DH: well obviously this won’t be the one.

It was. We loved it. We’re buying it. We got some money off (this is the thing about selling for less right now, you can also buy for less). We were initially wary of houses that had hung around for a while, but it’s a weird market right now and it also turned out the seller had refused some other offers for understandable reasons.

Some properties sell so quickly that they never appear on Right Move. Mine did (in 2021 when the market was crazy). The estate agent gave potential buyers on their “hot list” a copy of the advert, and one of them bought it within a week.

That said, the market has changed and I think some sellers are struggling to accept that higher interest rates generally mean lower asking prices. So they hang on for the (unrealistic) price they want.

I expect it is people who had their houses on in the summer that have come to the end of the contract with their estate agents and are switching to another company

My guess is that they switched agents. When we had a sale fall through the agents suggested we reduce our asking price so it would pop up in Rightmove alerts again. It doesn't pop up as a new listing when it switches from SSTC back to For Sale.

I'm trying to buy a house and the area I'm looking in has a lot of overpriced ones. I'm a property developer/landlord and some of them are ridiculously priced for what they are, I don't think they'll ever sell unless the sellers have a reality check.

Could be many reasons- my friend’s house looks like it has been on the market for over a year but it’s only because 2 sales have fallen through not because she hasn’t received offers.

I've been looking at houses in Wales also and there are loads of 3/4 beds that stay listed for ages, reduced in price and still haven't sold. I think it's due to mortgage rates at the moment. A lot of first time buyers looking where they may well have saved enough for the deposit but the mortgage rates on a house that size is such a lot for most people around here. Mortgages used to work out cheaper each month than renting but it's the other way around right now on a lot of properties.

Are Rightmove short of properties to list?

Rightmove don't list properties themselves, Rightmove is a portal that facilitates the listing of properties for sale by individual estate agents.

It could be that these properties you are seeing have changed agents, or it could be that they were available for sale last year, didn't sell, were removed from the market and have now been re-listed.

Same here. Some houses in our town seem to have been taken off the market over Xmas (when no-one is actively looking to move anyway) and have just gone back on the market after halfterm. Until the mortgage rate lowers there wont be a rush on sales!

They don't even invest in new photos.