Estate agents who value high to win instructions to be revealed
Swirb says its new approach to crunching housing market data will enable vendors to spot when an estate agency is over-pricing their home.
A recently-launched house price data company claims it can spot when agents over-price properties in order to win instructions.
Aaron Robinson (pictured, below), CEO of Swirb.com says his company’s unique way of tracking individual property sales and prices in the UK means agents who value high and then quickly reduce to sell are easier to spot.
“Take an agency like Foxtons, for example; we can quantify from our data that the reputation that it has for over-valuing properties [to gain instructions] could be true,” says Robinson.
“We believe this is because their branch staff are given targets to secure listings and so it’s in their interest to say to vendors that they can sell their property for more.
“At the moment this data isn’t out there and we think it should be.”
As The Negotiator reported recently, Swirb is a new property company that claims to offer a different way of tracking house prices than other housing market data providers.
Data is key
“We want to do better things with house price data and in particular for valuations,” says Robinson.
“Data is the key to the UK property market going forward and at the moment it’s quite opaque.”
Robinson says his company has spent a significant period of time collecting information from the sales market from various sources, including several that other house price indices don’t yet use.
This, Swirb also claims, has helped it to already have valuations down to an average 12% variance from sale price.
