Checklists

Checklist provided by 

www.theadvisory.co.uk

People often talk about the property market being a ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ market, but what does this actually mean if you are buying or selling a home?

We have created this checklist with TheAdvisory to help you work out what’s happening in your local property market

Enter your postcode into TheAdvisory’s Propcast tool. This will tell you if you are buying or selling in a good or poor market.

If the market is hot it’s a sellers’ market. There means there is strong buyer demand so, if you are selling, you have the potential to find a buyer quickly. If you are buying, you may have to compete with others for your dream home, potentially driving up prices.

If the market is cold it’s a buyers’ market. There is weak buyer demand and it’s likely it will take you longer to find a buyer. If you are buying, however, this means you may be in a stronger position to negotiate with the seller.

To find out how long it might take you to sell your property, put your postcode into home.co.uk and half way down the list, click on ‘Selling times’ in your postcode.

To work out what the market is like for your individual property:

1. Go onto a portal eg Rightmove or Nethouseprices
2. Put a price range 20% below what you want to spend and 10% above eg for a £200k property select a price range of £160k-£220k
3. Set the number of bedrooms to 1 bed below and 1-bed above the actual number of bedrooms you have/wanteg for a 3-bed property select a bedroom range of 2-4
4. Set the property type to match your property eg detached
5. Select the option to “include Under Offer, Sold STC”, then search.
6. You need a minimum of 10 results, so if you only get 5, expand your search radius and write down the exact number of results (A)
7. Now open the “Filters” option and untick the “Include Under Offer, Sold STC” option. Make a note of the new number of results Rightmove displays (B)
8. Work out how many properties are Under Offer or Sold STC by subtracting (B) from (A) to give (C)
9. Now divide (C) by (A) to give you the percentage of total stock on market that is currently Under Offer, Sold STC.

How hot or cold is the property market for the home you want to sell or buy?

• 0% - 25% = very cold / extreme buyers’ market
• 26% - 35% = cold / buyers’ market
• 36% - 50% = hot / sellers’ market
• 51% - 100% = very hot / extreme sellers’ market

What to do next?

Repeat this exercise monthly to track your market and see if it’s heating up or cooling. This will correlate strongly with whether prices are rising or falling.

Don’t forget you can check your market in seconds by using TheAdvisory’s PropCast tool.