When Should You Reduce Your House Price?

Lowering your asking price is the first suggestion your estate agent will make, but is it the right one in your situation? 

If you have your house on the open market with an estate agent, they might start pushing you to reduce your asking price, but there are other things to think about before agreeing to it. 

We’re experts in fast house sales, so we’ve put together this guide to help you do the right thing without losing out—let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

• Knowing when to reduce house price in the UK

• What to do before reducing your asking price

• How to sell your house quicker

Knowing when to reduce house price in the UK

Your estate agent will always ask you to lower the asking price if there’s a perceived lack of interest in your property. Of course, it’ll make their job easier to sell it if they can reduce the cost to one of the lowest in the area, so it makes sense that this is one of the most common estate agent tactics (they have targets to meet after all).

Read more: How to avoid estate agent tricks of the trade

At the end of the day, though, you’re paying them to sell your property at a price that suits you, so it shouldn’t just be the default if they get impatient. The first thing you should do if they suggest this is ask why—what is their reasoning for lowering the asking price? Did they misjudge the market when they valued it in the first place? Or has the demand changed since your listing went live?

It might not actually be the real issue with the lack of a buyer or even offers or viewings. Thankfully, there are other things you can do before you resort to lowering what you’re asking for it.

What to do before reducing your asking price

Dropping your asking price is not always the right thing to do. Here’s a great quote from David Warburton of Burton James that sums it up quite well: 

“Should I drop my asking price?

Perhaps your estate agent has even suggested you reduce your asking price. However, for many homes, and in particular for premium price homes, reducing the asking price may not work in your favour, instead making buyers wary. Rather than drawing in offers, you could find the price reduction (especially a series of price reductions over a period of time) could raise suspicions”

So, before jumping the gun and reducing your asking price, what can you do?

1. Ask your estate agents what they have done

Once you’ve determined their reasoning, you’ll be in a position to ask if your estate agent is really doing enough to sell your property. Reducing the asking price is an easy way to pass the blame, but is it really the issue at hand?

There are a few things you can ask to make sure your estate agent is maximising your property’s potential to sell:

• Is the property listed on all the available portals, such as Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket?

• Have they shown off your property in its best light in the photos and videos?

• Are they making tweaks to the description of the property and ensuring absolutely every selling point is in there?

• Is your property regularly featured in their newsletter? You should sign up to check.

• Are they recommending your property to potential buyers who are viewing other comparable properties in the local area?

Keeping them on their toes will help push your property in all the right places. Recent Zoopla data suggests that sellers should expect to receive an offer within 38 days, so if you’ve been waiting longer than that, it might be time to reconsider your options.

2. Get other property experts in to value your home

You might have stuck with one estate agent so far and they might have misvalued your home, so it’s worth asking others for a valuation so you can be sure it accurately reflects the supply and demand of the housing market.

You can get a free house valuation from The Property Buying Company within hours—try it now to find out how much your house is actually worth (it might give you food for thought over your current estate agent arrangement).

3. Research the local comparable properties yourself

Even if you’re a self-proclaimed novice when it comes to property, a little research should help you determine your home’s rough value.

Use websites like Rightmove to find the sold house prices in your area, especially for those that are similar in terms of size, the number of bedrooms and the condition. Take Manchester, for example—here’s a look at different house prices and the average time they spent on the market according to the number of bedrooms (data from Home.co.uk):

You can use online value calculators, too, but you should take their results with a pinch of salt. There are a couple of online calculators that will value your home, but some of these can be manipulated and they don’t really take into account the condition.

If it turns out your house is for sale above the ceiling cost for your street (every street has one), reducing the asking price might be the way forward.

4. Consider redecorating (or simply rearranging)

If your house is getting viewings, but not offers, the issue might lie with something about the property itself. Everybody’s tastes are different, so there might be something about the decor of a certain room or the lighting of another that’s holding people’s visions back—have a think about whether or not a refresh will help you along on the open market. 

Be sure to compare your house to others that are selling or have sold in your area or elsewhere—use Rightmove to research recent house prices to get started. 

Scroll through all the photos of properties in similar conditions with similar numbers of bedrooms and do side-by-side comparisons with yours. You might find that redecorating or rearranging your most important rooms will pique the interest of more potential buyers.

5. Update or add to your listing photos 

Whether you decide to refresh your rooms or not, it might also be worth taking another look at the photos on your listing. Is there a better way to show off your property’s ‘good side’ and put it in front of more people? 

House buyers spend a lot of time on websites like Rightmove and Zoopla, so they quickly get familiar with (and perhaps bored of) the photos. Will new photos reveal a new way to look at your living room, for example? Will your bathroom look better at another time of day? How can you make your kitchen look more inviting? 

These are all valid questions to ask yourself and your estate agent to make sure your listing is working as hard as it can for your property sale.

6. Reduce wisely and at the right time

If you do choose to finally reduce your asking price, you need to make sure you do it at the right moment and to the right degree. 

Determine Rightmove’s next price alert band below your asking price and consider dropping just beneath it to trigger emails for prospective buyers. Many people have these alerts set up at increments of £10,000, so you might not have to reduce by much to reveal your property to a whole host of other buyers.

How to sell your house quicker

Before you hastily adjust the price of your listing, though, you might want to look at getting a free cash offer from us to weigh up alongside your other options.

There’s no obligation to accept our offer, of course, but if you reduce your asking price on the open market, we then, in turn, will need to reduce the amount we can offer you. However, if you come to us before reducing your price, although our offer will be below market value, it may be higher than the reduction you have in mind.

If you’re sick of waiting for a sale, selling to a cash buyer like us can be a great way to offload your property and move on, whether it’s into that dream home you’ve found or to another country entirely. Here’s how your options stack up: 

Get in touch today if you’d like to explore the possibility of selling by the end of next week (yes, really).