Zoopla, the property listing website has a number of little wrinkles that most people either don’t know about or just don’t use. www.zoopla.co.uk.
Here are a couple, that might or might not be of use to you but should give you an alternate point of view.
The first one I’m not actually that keen on but I understand the theory and thought I would pass it along.
Zoopla by default lists properties in order of when they came on the market. But they also allow you to filter the list by how popular the property is – that is to say how many times the property has been viewed. So why is this useful? I’ll explain…
You see it’s all about supply and demand. If you’re going to get a great deal you need the person selling to be motivated and willing to negotiate. If they are being bowled over in the stampede of keen buyers coming to their door they are unlikely to be willing to accept a lower offer. On the other hand, if they are getting very little interest then you may be in a better bargaining position that might have originally thought…
Unfortunately I haven’t got an example at this point, but if you were search by post code on Zoopla and then sort by most popular you might (and I do mean might) find a properties at opposite ends of the popularity listing which were relatively similar. E.g. two bed detached house, in broadly the same postcode, but its possible that the property at the bottom end of the popularity scale may be firstly cheaper but also more amenable to a cheeky offer.
Of course there may be all kinds of very good reasons why one property is less popular, all I’m suggesting is that its an alternate way to look at the data that sometimes generates interesting alternatives.
The other method is to sort the list by “most reduced”, which exactly as it implies will tell you how much each property has had its asking price reduced by in percentage terms, when it was reduced and how long the property has been listed. Now I was just playing with this and found a property that had been reduced by over 23%, that does not necessarily mean that it’s a good deal, as I said there could very good reasons, even just the obvious one that it was overvalued in the first place. However, with a bit of further research you might find a property that’s worth an offer and where you can get a deal. Just a thought.
