Getting the most for a vendor’s property, how do the leading agents compare?

When a homeowner chooses to bring their property to the market, one of the first questions they’ll be asking themselves is ‘how much is my property worth?’. This will likely be followed by contact with a number of estate agents and hear what they have to say, their opinions and indicate just how confident they are that they can achieve the maximum possible potential sale value.

Over the years I’ve had many conversations with agents about property prices and as a general statement would suggest that a property is worth what someone is prepared to pay, and if a mortgage is involved, how much the lender is prepared to loan.

If the above is wholly true, can an agent have an impact on the eventual achieved value? That is the question I’d like to investigate and will look at the data held within TwentyEAs Valuation v Price Achieved report.

TwentyCi Group COO, Paul Halliwell, published a detailed explanation of how we produce this report that you can see here. I’m going to look at the regions of England outside of London and compare the agents who have listed the most properties in the last 12 months (Top 10) and see what the variance in typical price achieved is.

Let’s take the region where I live, the North West, where the closest price bracket for new properties coming to market in the last 12 months was £200,000. When we look at the average price achieved in the same period, as confirmed by the land registry, this is £201,062.

When looking at the typical price an agent brings a property to market, in comparison to TwentyEAs automated valuation model, and how it is then typically reduced when contracts are exchanged, we can see a stark difference between the best and worst performer.

In the North West, the best performing agent in the top 10 would sell a typical property for £206,040 and the worst £198,319. This in a not insubstantial £7,721 which would more than cover an estate agents fee and leave change to pay for more of the sellers’ costs of moving.

In the regions, where is the greatest and least variance in top 10 agent performance in relation to typical price achieved?

The South East sees the biggest differential with the best performing agent likely to achieve over £14,000 more than the worst on a typical house sale. Yorkshire & The Humber sees the closest performance match with a differential of just over £6,500.

So back to my earlier statement, do I still think it to be true? Well the data suggests that we need to factor something else in.

What is a house worth? It’s worth what someone’s prepared to pay, what a bank is prepared to lend and how skilful the seller’s agent is in negotiating the best possible price.

If you want to understand how the agents are performing in your specific area, and if your business can demonstrate to potential sellers that you’re likely leave your sellers better off once you’ve exchange contracts then you can sign up to the free version of Insight here.

For a more detailed examination of your business then sign up here and we can demonstrate where our data could help and support you.