No viewings

[Ellena646]

Hi, we have been on the market for four weeks and not had one viewing. The agent just keeps repeating "It's August, very quiet" on a loop, although we are now in September. Just wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same thing. Not sure if it's the agent, the market, the price... Never been on the market and had zero viewings in the first month before...

Would you be prepared to provide a link? Sometimes the MN collective sees something that the agents have missed.

@GuestFeatu some people just hugely overprice even in lower priced areas ( where people can still get mortgages reasonably easy)!relative to other properties that are on the market and basically factor in what they need/want for their own circumstances rather than what houses are realistically actually selling for -

So whilst I think in many areas the mortgage factors and other factors I mentioned are a big deal in certain lower priced areas I think it's less about the factors I mentioned and more about overpricing relative to the competition out there.

For instance in my father in laws case there were nicer done up places on the market but his has a layout that would be useful to others in certain circumstances ( a bedroom and bathroom downstairs as well as 2 upstairs) and lots more land than the others

We had four viewing in the space of four weeks over August. But in the last week it’s been dead- not a whiff of interest. Our agent has much the same as OP and it’s a quiet time etc. They have told me it’s not the price and just the market at the moment which seems to have stalled.

So on reflection if the market has stalled…it must be the price…

All kind of excuses but never the price:

• it's December, people are busy with holidays
• it's January, people are tired after holidays, it is raining, it is cold
• wait for the flowers in your garden to bloom, you'll get queues of buyers
• wait for a Bank holiday because there is nothing better to do for buyers than waste some time and hundreds of thousands for some overpriced piles of bricks
• it's summer, people are on holiday
• there are some elections, of course people are not buying
• there is a budget coming, people are staying put
• it's September, people just returned from holiday and are tired again
• etc.

Try an experiment, put you house on the market for half the price of the last property sold in the area.
You will get so many viewings that you will break the national record😀

On the market since May and only had one viewing, got a viewing and an offer on Friday🤞.

On the market since the start of June and had about 6 viewings (?) and only 1 was in a position to proceed. Most didn’t even have their homes on the market yet. The one that did want to offer still hadn’t sold theirs (this was start of July) and we’ve heard nothing since.

Our house is an above average price property and in a good area but it’s a village location and from looking at Rightmove this year (and confirmed by estate agent) it seems to be rural locations here that are stagnating and the city’s still selling well. There’s about 5 other large houses, all higher value properties, in our village that have been on for sale for longer than us and a few of them have dropped price a couple of times (one v dramatically!) and still they are on. I guess the answer is we are all overpriced for the current market conditions? But then, as a seller, you still have a rock bottom limit you would go to before you give up and wait (unless you desperately need to move).

There’s a weekly YouTube video that’s often recommended on this board (sorry I cant remember the name!) where the guy goes through the weekly stats and analyses them, comparing to past years. I’ve watched the last few and the gist seems to be that there are a hell of a lot of properties on right now so the market is pretty saturated. Sales figures are the same compared to past good years but with more properties on this is of course a lower percentage of that which is available. Maybe too many properties and not enough buyers. We’re giving it another month and will probably come off and try again when the market is (hopefully) on the up.

Thank you all for your replies. We are in a popular area of a city where the property market is usually (even in a down turn) quite busy. It's in move-in condition and recently remodelled, with great transport links to London on the doorstep... so it's got to be the price? After reading all of these responses I checked the agent's website and it doesn't look like they've sold anything recently – maybe they have over-priced everything? If offers are coming in on some properties of 10 - 20 percent under asking price, is that how much we should lower it by?

Yeah it’s the price op,no one can say how much you should reduce it by unless you post a link. But it must be significant if no one even wants to look

@Crikeyalmighty I guess you could say that your example are either a price issue on the 'micro' level (individual overpriced homes relative to the competition) or on the 'macro' level (markets stalling because of lack of credit/ income relative to advertised prices).

@xxltom the excuses that people (especially agents) make up seem to be never ending. Some of the agents seem almost to be trying to go out of business!

@Ellena646 It's impossible to be sure how much you should lower the price by. Maybe try 10% and see if that stimulates some interest.

> There’s a weekly YouTube video that’s often recommended on this board (sorry I cant remember the name!) where the guy goes through the weekly stats and analyses them, comparing to past years. I’ve watched the last few and the gist seems to be that there are a hell of a lot of properties on right now so the market is pretty saturated.

UK Property Stats show with Chris Watkin:

To avoid listening to the whole thing you can click “more” on the YouTube page and just read the comments where he lists the stats.

He also lists the stats on the website he writes for: Property Industry Eye

About once a week I browse Property Industry Eye’s most recent stories and I ONLY click on the stories where I can see 1 or more comments have been made. It’s always the estate agents commenting. It’s where you go to see comments along the lines of “in what area? Been waiting for the phone to ring all summer” in response to nonsense such as Rightmove posting an article saying things are really looking up in the sales area.

Their comments are a very telling reflection of what’s actually going on.

I generally don’t bother reading articles with no comments because it’s usually utter BS by people like Zoopla and Rightmove trying to talk the market up, e.g. “house prices in august up 2%”!!!

No mate. People are trying to get 2% more and are listing it for that much more, but you never do stats on how much the price drops when it goes sold STC, do you? Tell me what the drop is from asking and sold STC.

They won’t tell you that but Chris Watkin covers it in his weekly show.

"After reading all of these responses I checked the agent's website and it doesn't look like they've sold anything recently – maybe they have over-priced everything?"

See the Chris Watkins videos (above). Go to the end section where they review the stats for an area. See the data available from the TwentyEA Insights application. Ask your EA for their data compared to the market.

We've been on 12 months, reduced valuation by 45k, getting viewers but most of them haven't sold their property. 1 offer accepted, but lost them as they lost their buyer. We've now changed agents. Still keeping fingers crossed, but got to admit, some days positive, some days I'm ready to take it off the market. Properties in the area, I'd say 80% have reduced in price and some have been on over 12 months.

We've been viewing recently and had some difficulties arranging viewings due to EA inflexibility. These tend not to be local EAs. One would only show a house on Wednesdays, so we've just ruled that one out as we can't get. Another on a Sunday, we really liked that so made an additional trip. But it's terribly hard sometimes to even view.

As I said above, some agents seem to be trying to go out of business. In a market where interest from buyers is low and drop out rates high, some of them still don't see the need to be flexible and helpful!

It might not be the EA. Some home owners have restricted viewings for many reasons; work; health; life. We can only do viewings three days a week for a few reasons. So many EAs told me when we listed that if a buyer is really serious about looking at a house they will find some room in their schedule to do those days of the week, as proven by you making more effort for the Sunday viewing because you "really liked that."

As someone who is looking to buy in London at the moment, but thankfully with no time pressure, it does seem estate agents everywhere are overvaluing quite significantly. Everywhere I’ve looked at has already reduced by 10-15% and I’d still not put in an offer without knocking the same off again.

The market is a bit off kilter compared to pre pandemic and pre brexit. I have a sneaking feeling that the banks and estate agents think that property has automatically kept increasing at the same rate it did before when it really hasn’t. Not least because inflation has been way higher than wage growth and so people don’t have the purchasing power they might’ve.

Worse, there’s a real dearth of second time buyers that used to be essential. Why? Because of the mad new build craze that has debt trapped hundreds of thousands of people particularly in London. Help to buy led people to buy hugely overvalued one and two bed flats that either won’t sell or will only sell at a major loss, so the normal pipeline of second time buyers is no longer there.

Basically, it’s all kinds of fucked.

Update: I had a long chat with the manager of the EA yesterday, who told us not to lower the price because he has other homes on his books who have done that by 20% and it's made no difference at all, and he is advising home owners not to do that because once you do, you can't put it back up again when the market changes unless you come off for a while. He said that in twenty years of being an EA he has never seen such a stagnant market. As an example he said that on a day when their office might normally do 20 viewings, they are now doing 2. He also said that he didn't have a solution to the problem, and didn't want to pretend that he did. He suggested staying on until the end of September because traditionally there is an uptake in Autumn. He doesn't think the Budget will make a positive difference unless they reduce stamp duty, but then he cited 2021 when all that did was drive up the prices even higher to compensate, and what followed in 2022 was a readjustment to normality, which statistics then referred to as a quieter market. Not sure any of this helps, but it would seem price might not be the issue?

The issue with knocking off big percentages is that when a buyer tries to do that to the seller, the seller then has to persuade their vendor to do the same, and no-one wants to budge. No-one wants to sell low and buy high, so unless everyone gets in line and takes a hit, it will continue to stall. It takes really skilled EAs to convince someone further in the chain to also drop 20 - 30 percent off the price so that it doesn't all collapse. I also worry that this "buyer's market" mentality is part of the problem. There seems to be a really unhelpful hangover from 2023 that sellers are desperate and will take any offers, which is not true and the resistance to that might be part of the current problem.

@Ellena646 absolutely - it’s a mess of conflicting assumptions by all sides at the moment. No idea what it’ll take to correct it at this point.

Sellers are desperate though because interest rates have been terrible (for mortgages) for a year, there’s a budget coming in 7 weeks that we know is going to be bad and it’s just a qs of how bad, and then SDLT is going up in March. Plus Xmas is coming which is traditionally a bad quarter to try and sell.

If it makes you feel any better, we only managed to up our viewings and get second viewings (and an offer) once we'd dropped by 15%, which was a whopping amount and means that we've effectively lost money on the place. The key though is that the house we're buying is also not at top price, so it does event things out a bit.

But also we don't work Sundays so it was possible. A weekdays only viewing means a day off work. Absolutely impossible.

I feel sorry for you. It's very frustrating.

Bookmark this page. A new RICS survey should be out quite soon. At the end of the survey selected EA's give a market sentiment snapshot. Find the one closest to you to see if it chimes.

www.rics.org/news-insights/market-surveys/uk-residential-market-survey

It must be super frustrating for you and all the other sellers desperately wanting to move on but, with respect, your agent is deluding themselves and misleading the sellers on their books. The only reason why the market is 'stagnant' in some areas is because agents/ sellers are pricing unrealistically relative to what potential buyers can afford. There are no other possible reasons and quiet August/ waiting for the budget/ it's wet or whatever are just people providing excuses to escape that reality that (most) buyers can't afford current prices. Quite honestly, it's your agents job to find a solution to this problem; it's literally his/her job to do this, so I would find him saying 'I have no solution' unacceptable if I were trying to sell.
I agree that resistance is part of the problem but it's more resistance on the part of sellers (obviously lots of sellers are buyers too). Let's face it, if buyers can borrow more and more money, most will take it and buy a bigger and better house. This is what has happened historically because humans always want more. It's been positively encouraged by recent policies and lending and is exactly what has been happening for a long time. If potential buyers, as a group, are not buying in your area, it is because they can't borrow and therefore can't afford the prices or those that might stretch do not think current offerings are worth the money or they will end up in negative equity as prices fall or are too worried about job security, etc.
I appreciate that you will probably believe your own agent over a random person on the internet but, if you think about it logically, there is no other explanation. Looking at the macro situation globally, it's clearly been deteriorating for some time and is only looking worse.