Viewing a house overpriced by nearly 100k.

[greendoorbluehandle]

Is it cheeky to offer what it's actually worth?

The estate agent has told us it's a vendor led price. It's been for sale a year this month and was originally listed for 370k, now for OIRO 330k. It's a 3 bed semi detached bungalow in a village where similar houses sell for 245-265k. They bought it in 2017 for 135k and have put new flooring down and a new bathroom and done the garden up but to expect 200k more than they paid is absurd.

We need a small mortgage so it will get valued by the bank, Zoopla is usually very accurate with valuations on houses we've bought in the past matching bank valuations and that's valuing it at 260k.

My DH thinks we view it then offer 250k of we like it and leave the offer on the table (we're in no rush) and hope they come to their senses. We know that competing estate agents valued it at 245k and 255k but they listed it at 370k?! The greed is quite shocking!

Zoopla and RICS red book values values are only even vaguely reliable if the area you’re looking at has a large volume of similar property types and a high volume of transactions. If you are looking at areas with widely varying or unique properties (either because of property size, type, view etc) then a Zoopla valuation is as much a stab in the dark as a RICS valuation in the same circumstances. Which is to say, not very reliable.

WRT Zoopla valuation I've just looked at two neighbouring local properties which were built by the same company, to the same specification, and still remain with the original purchasers, who paid the same price. Both have been well maintained and neither have had any additions like conservatory, garage, or alterations etc. so they essentially remain the same. They certainly remain the same for a text-book style valuation.

Zoopla's middle price valuation differs by £130,000 in favour of the one which is slightly less desirable due to its driveway being just around a blind bend.

Zoopla “valuations” are notoriously unreliable.

The house may well be overpriced but I wouldn’t be viewing properties over 300k if my budget was 250k/260k. Until the sellers reduce the price, it seems wildly optimistic hoping that a deal can be done.

Totally agree. View properties in your price range. Any vendor that is putting on a property so vastly over value, isn’t serious about selling.

Just offer what you want but if the house has been up for a year the seller doesn’t sound to be in a rush either and may be just sitting till they get what they want. We once viewed a house at 340 house had been on market a year so offered 325 then when that declined offered 330 and they said they’d leave it on the table for now, we then carried on looking elsewhere as we didn’t want to be waiting around, 4 months down the line estate agent rang us to let us know sellers were no further along in the process of finding a new house so I told them our offer was off the table as we were moving in to a different house in 2 weeks.

Zoopla advises our semi is worth 50k less than the attached one. This is completely ridiculous- there is no reason for this disparity. We are the corner house but can't believe this affects the price. Not sure Zoopla valuations are the benchmark.

I agree. They are often wildly off target!