How do you gauge which agents are successful at selling and how accurate they are at valuing your home? Rightmove, Zoopla and other portals provide all estate agents with a wealth of data on how clients properties are performing online, but also on how well each business stacks up against other agents. You may have seen plenty of pie charts and statistics used by agents in the press or online – usually designed to show how they are the No1 at this or that (for more info, see our blog post on The No1 rule).
Agents can collate data easily via these websites on amounts of new instructions, available stock, sales agreed, price reductions, time on market and other parameters. We can also adjust searches on geographical area, price ranges and sample dates so it would be quite simple to tailor a specific search to highlight success in one or more areas.
“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.”
― Mark Twain
For facts, you have to dig a bit deeper and, when we combined several different searches together, an interesting pattern started to emerge.
What we wanted to look for was two facts I’m sure lots of sellers want to know –
- how successful are agents at actually selling their clients homes?
- how accurate are their initial valuations?
To give a reasonable range of examples, we collected results from five Bath agents (ourselves included) – a mix of corporate and independent, all with similar activity levels. We searched for results with the following parameters, from Jan 1st 2017 to Sept 12th 2017 and across the whole of Bath with no price range specified;
- Available stock
- Sales agreed
- Price reductions
These three broad searches were then combined into two results –
- Number of available properties versus sales agreed in the same time period
- Number of available properties versus price reductions in the same time period
For more articles, search our main website or visit us on Facebook