Should I Reduce My Price?

Depending on market conditions, the level of interest being attained, your circumstances and advice from your estate agent you may occasionally need to reduce your price to achieve the desired result from your property sale. Interestingly at the moment almost half of the properties advertised on Rightmove have had to reduce which is an indicator of there being more choice now for buyers than there has been for some time and that some agents/clients have perhaps been a little over ambitious with their initial pricing.

So, if I have decided this is my plan - what should my next move be? Well firstly speak to the agent. I always say, only reduce a price if it’s going to make a discernible difference. Rightmove’s rules are that a property must reduce by 2% or more to qualify as a ‘reduction’ in their system and therefore be re-circulated to their vast database of clients. If you are thinking less than that? I’d question what difference you are going to be making. It will change it online but you won’t get the benefit of the additional exposure of landing in a few thousand inboxes within the next few hours.

Price Points

Our next tip is to aim for a ‘price point’. When you search on Rightmove or Zoopla or other property sites, it generally asks you to select a price range you are looking in. Up to 100k, 110k, 120k etc. This switches to £25,000 intervals above £300,000 and then £50,000 intervals over £500,000. As new searches on these portals see properties defaulted from high to low in their originally chosen search band you have a far greater chance of being seen if you are at, or just below a ‘price point’. This is particularly the case now where the general attention span on a mobile device is shorter than ever. A WhatsApp pings in and takes your potential buyers attention? They might not reach you down on page two of their scroll.

Never was the science of this more obvious than in 2015 when we took over the marketing of a block of flats in Halton from another agent who had been largely unsuccessful. There were 21 flats in the block. We put some prices up and some down so they were all at a relevant price point. Interest picked up hugely and we ultimately sold them all in reasonably quick time. It does work! Have a look where your nearest price point is and aim for it - so long as the reduction is then over 2% you’ll get the double benefit of re-circulation by the national websites and better visibility in the market moving forward if that initial bounce doesn’t get the job done.