Series: What Do Estate Agents Do?
Good Advice and The Valuation Process
If you’re thinking of selling your property and wondering the best way to go about marketing your property, it may help to understand the service offered by a high street agent over an online estate agency. Over the next few weeks, our Series: What Do Estate Agents Do? will look at every part of the service you can expect from using a local agent rather than an online agent, including marketing your property, accompanied viewings, negotiating offers and stress-free sales progression.
This week, we explain how a good agent will provide sound advice before you’ve even instructed us and how the valuation process works.
Good Advice
Straight-talking sincere advice can be invaluable in a world where too many people would just tell you what you want to hear! For example, the oldest trick in the book is for an agent to suggest an inflated suggested asking price in order to impress you enough to secure your business, only for tears to follow down the line when the property has gone stale on the market and the price has to be dramatically reduced in order to secure a sale.
So good advice is key. A good estate agent recognises their responsibility not only to address any questions posed by the vendor, but sometimes, where appropriate, to go beyond the obvious. This is because there is often more than meets the eye to an otherwise straightforward market appraisal.
For example, a vendor might want a quick sale in order to relieve a financial problem. Yet it may be that the property could be let out readily and would immediately start to produce the income needed to solve the problem without the need for a sale.
Most people of course are keen to maximise their sale price and this is also your agent’s objective. So let your agent advise you as there may be value in unexpected areas. Perhaps re-configuring the way in which your rooms are used in order to better fit with current lifestyles could increase the value of your property – if anyone knows what’s hot and what’s not it’s your local estate agent!
Valuation
Valuation is possibly the most contentious aspect of estate agency, and emotions run high when discussing most people’s most valuable asset. It is natural that the vendor of a property will want as much as possible for it, as does the agent.
However, vendors should be careful about opinions over value, especially when everyone seems to have one – friends, relatives, taxi drivers and blokes in pubs!
The actual value of a property is of course the maximum figure that at least one able buyer would be prepared to pay. Frankly, the only person to know what this figure could be is an estate agent who is comprehensively familiar with the current market and involved with qualified buyers daily. It may be that potential imminent movement in the market can also be anticipated, although this is a skill few possess.
Certainly on-line value calculators are misleading and plain wrong in many cases as they simply cannot take account of the foibles of local buyer activity and competing properties available for sale, both of which change from week to week.
When choosing the right estate agent for you it’s certainly worth finding out how accurate their valuations are. A good agent should be able to tell you what percentage of their original asking price they actually achieve on average for their clients, as well as how long they took to find a buyer against national averages.
Needless to say, we’d be happy to provide you with some expert advice on the likely sale value of your home. This would be based on extensive research coupled with an intuition that comes from deep local experience as evidenced by our consistently proven results. Please feel free to contact your local Arden Estates Office today, you might be pleasantly surprised!