Hugely different online property valuations

[Aboveandbeyond25]

I know you have to take them with a pinch of salt (particularly Move Market) but does anyone know why the online valuation for Move Market would be drastically different than the Halifax House Price Index valuation (my mortgage is with Halifax).

The current Halifax House Price Index valuation on my home is approx £525k but the Move Market online valuation shows at £430k! This is a huge difference and I am just wondering why, given they are both based on data.

I would stop looking at ANY online valuations and get some actual estate agents around to value it for you.

Honestly, desk valuations are awful. For a remortgage, my house was desk valued at 150k below the market value. If I had put it on the market at that price, it would have sold before I left the estate agent's office

Also not all the online tools have the latest data. Zoopla bases mine on a last sold price in 2015 and it’s been totally renovated and sold twice since then.
Their valuation is about 20% too low compared to the actual selling prices.

I don't know about Halifax, but I tried the calculator on the Nationwide site and it "valued" my house at £100k less than the price it SSTC after being on the market for just a couple of days - ie: the "priced to sell" price.I notice it characterises the postcode on an extremely generic basis - I think it called me "outer metropolitan" so it's really not considering your actual local market, just doing a very generic wild stab.

Everyone will say their house is under valued compared to zoopla etc. "Oh next door sold for £600k but zoopla says £500k for ours which is also a 4 bed" ... failing to mention that next door is on a larger plot and has much bigger room sizes.

For what it's worth, one of our properties was overvalued by zoopla. It said around £800k but it was really worth £550k.

Online valuations are notoriously unreliable and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Halifax estimated my house value at about 90k above what an estate agent did. Apparently they take really broad data from your area and have no idea of the specifics of your property, and haven't really taken into account we are in a stagnant and falling market.

Thanks all - I’m not planning on selling but we are remortgaging soon and we’re surprised by the Halifax valuation being so high. We thought the house would be worth somewhere in the middle of the Halifax and move market values. I was just interested as to how they reach such different numbers given they are both supposedly based on market data but I guess they must use different historic data

Yes I believe they do use some different data hence wildly different results sometimes. An EA valuation would be more accurate though likely to be on the optimistic side.

Your house could have fallen into a sink hole and Move Market would give the same valuation...same if you had installed an Olympic -sized swimming pool and a helipad.