Advertisement Feature
Is now a good time to sell your house? With so much hype surrounding property prices, it’s easy to get lost in the difference between asking prices and sold house prices. Find out why sold house prices often provide an accurate indicator.
After the property market famously took a nosedive during the credit crunch, house prices have at last begun to pick up again. But with housing sales having experienced such a subdued period and the future remaining fairly uncertain, many prospective home sellers still don’t feel particularly confident. As a result, they’re biding their time - watching and waiting to ensure they pick a propitious moment to nail up the “for sale” sign.
It’s all very well hypothesising about how much your home might fetch on the open market, but it’s far better to be armed with some hard facts. One way of finding out the information you need is to follow the sold prices of similar properties in your area, to gain an insight into what sort of price your property might actually realise if you were to put it on to the market at the current time.
But how and where can you lay your hands on this sort of information? You can hardly knock on the door of a recently sold property in your neighbourhood and say to the erstwhile or new owner: “Excuse me, please - I wonder if you’d be kind enough to tell me how much this house sold for?”
A slightly less “in your face” approach would be to do a tour of local estate agents and ask them how much the properties they’ve recently sold have gone for, but this could turn into an extremely time-consuming process.
It’s far easier to search for listings of sold house prices on a dedicated property price website where you can access a host of information about property prices at the click of a mouse, giving you an immediate overview of the current housing market in any part of the UK.
Of course, seeing that the house next door has made a certain price is absolutely no guarantee that your home will do likewise, as other factors – such as internal decor, kitchen and bathroom fittings, whether curtains and carpets are included, the size of the garden and how well stocked it is etc. – also come into play when a house is sold.
However, at least up-to-date sold house prices provide a more accurate barometer of the property market in a particular area than asking prices do. Indeed, the latter can be extremely misleading and can buoy a seller’s hopes temporarily, only to dash them again when it transpires that there’s a £50,000 shortfall between what they’ve seen being asked for similar properties and what their own home actually sells for at the end of the day.
If there’s a newly sold house in your street, you can be sure that you’re not alone in being curious about how much over or under the asking price it made. Quite apart from being a matter of general interest, sold house prices also provide a valuable indicator for estate agents and property companies when they’re calculating a realistic asking price for your property.
In essence, sold house prices are non-fiction reading, whereas asking prices are all too often complete fiction.
Sold house prices provide a useful benchmark for both buyers and sellers.
