UK house prices: Buyers and sellers care about completely different things when assessing the value of a property
What would you care most about when buying a house? That it smells of fresh-baked bread or what the local crime figures are like?
You might think that buyers and sellers would place value on similar things, especially considering that most people in the process of buying one house are also simultaneously selling another, and vice versa.
But no.
It turns out that buyers and sellers think completely different things are important, as a study from online estate agent Emoov shows, in which they’ve asked what factors most influenced people’s opinion of a property’s potential.
While sellers are most fastidious about making sure the house is clean and tidy, and that it smells of homely things like fresh-brewed coffee or home-baked bread, it seems their efforts may be for naught.
Buyers, meanwhile, just want to know what the broadband speeds are like.
Their top concern is the safety of the local neighbourhood. But after that come more prosaic factors like broadband speed and mobile signal strength.
“I think it boils down to sentimental value a lot of the time, where a buyer is looking at a property from a different point of view to those that have attached themselves to it over the years,” said Russell Quirk, founder and chief executive of Emoov, adding:
It’s important that sellers really remove themselves from this emotional attachment and say, if I was buying this property what would my first impression be?
Interestingly, there’s only one factor that both buyers and sellers really go wild over. In a show of possibly extreme Britishness, both groups care most about a house having a “well-presented garden and a tidy lawn”.