Many will rejoice in the fact that more and more listings are appearing on major property portals at a reduced price. We may be long off the days where property will start to flood the market and auction houses, but for many who sit in rented property waiting for property prices to hit sensible valuation levels they will be encouraged to take a peek at what’s on the market.
On the official land registry website the following statement is shared:
“As of August 2018 the average house price in the UK is £232,797, and the index stands at 122.1. Property prices have risen by 0.2% compared to the previous month, and risen by 3.2% compared to the previous year.”
An article on Zoopla released October 2018 states:
“More than a third of British properties have been slashed in price – by an average of £26,131, or 8.5%”
So I decided to have a wonder over to our biggest two property portals, Rightmove and Zoopla, to see what the state of property prices is looking like for my local town of Colchester in Essex. How good were each platform and showing me those listings which have had the biggest price reductions so I can get a feel of the mood locally. I carried out a search for ‘Colchester‘ and ‘this area only‘:
Zoopla – 831 listings of which 355 have price reductions
Rightmove 1265 listings of which the keyword ‘Reduced’ is stated shows 78*
Zoopla to me have a better search system whereas a dedicated field for Reduced property is provided for consumers so you can indeed search on property that have reductions and then in biggest to lowest falls results. For my search in Colchester that was a whooping 23.5% to 0.8% off original prices.
When it comes to house prices, Zoopla seems to have a greater depth of information for the here and now of us searching for price reductions, you can also check local average asking prices and estimated sold within your town which is then broken down in to streets averages.
Rightmove offer sold prices on your search via house price data of land registry, a postcode search is required of which data displayed enables you to see results of previous years so to compare then and now.
Rightmove have no set way to search for reduced priced property other than keyword search which for me fails as listings with ‘Reduced’ in their title and within the listing do not appear within the search results.
The only remedy for there not being a reduced price section for me is to search by newly listed which will bring up not only the ‘added today’ listings, but also the ‘reduced today’ stock.
* The problem with my search for ‘Reduced‘ priced property on Rightmove is that their search system does not seem to react to all keywords within the listings, ie properties will be clearly marked ‘Reduced on a said date‘ though the Rightmove search will not showcase these and sometimes the keyword of ‘Reduced’ does not appear in the some of the results for the keyword the search produces. A little bit unreliable and the best way, so I find, to search for price reduction on Rightmove is manually of which there is most certainly more that the 78 the Rightmove search thinks there is.
Author: Christopher Walkey
Founder of Estate Agent Networking and an internationally invited speaker on how to build online target audiences using Twitter and LinkedIn.
