Same House, Two Different Numbers

There’s a standoff happening at a lot of kitchen tables right now. Phil and I see it most weeks.

The seller wants to know why they should accept less than they believe their home is worth. The buyer wants to know why they should pay more than they can comfortably afford. Both are fair questions. Neither person is being unreasonable. The sale still stalls.

What’s going on is simpler than it looks. They aren’t arguing about the same number.

The seller’s number

Plenty of local sellers bought during or just after Covid. That was a strange market. Everyone wanted a garden, a spare room and a view of something other than their own kitchen. Registers of Scotland recorded annual price growth above 5% every single month from October 2020 into late 2022. Homes regularly sold above Home Report value.

If you bought then, you may well have paid well over Home Report value at a closing date, where competition on the day can inflate a figure further still. Possibly too much. Your number is the price you paid, plus what you’ve spent since, plus what you need to land your next move. That’s the figure you’ll net. It’s real money. It’s entirely reasonable to care about it.

The buyer’s number

The buyer isn’t really looking at your price. They’re looking at a monthly payment.

When many of those Covid purchases went through, fixed mortgage rates of around 2% weren’t unusual. Last month the average five-year fix reached 6% for the first time in three years, according to Moneyfacts. Deals priced under 5% all but vanished within a few weeks.

On a £250,000 mortgage over 25 years, that’s the difference between roughly £1,060 a month and £1,610. Same house. Same loan. About £550 more every month. We’re not economists, we sell houses, but we can do that sum.

So when a buyer offers less than you hoped, they may not be trying it on. The lender may simply have drawn the line for them.

The market doesn’t take sides

What people call the post-Covid slump has been more of a cooling here. Scottish prices haven’t fallen. The average was still up 2.9% in the year to August. Fewer homes are changing hands though - and buyers have become far more careful. The frenzy has gone quiet.

The uncomfortable bit applies to both sides. A seller’s financial goal doesn’t set market value. A buyer’s budget doesn’t either. The market is simply where real demand, affordability and competition happen to meet. Some weeks they don’t meet at all.

A conversation we have a lot

Phil and I often have to give a seller a figure they don’t want to hear. It happens most with large homes, particularly ones renovated to a high standard.

We had exactly this conversation recently with the owners of a rural property. The owners had done the sum themselves, and fairly. Nearest Village price per square foot, multiplied by their floor area, matched another surveyor’s figure almost exactly. We told them plainly we probably wouldn’t win the instruction on our range.

Building costs have soared since Covid. Materials, trades, the lot. A new kitchen, new windows or an extension costs far more now than it did pre-Covid. Sellers quite reasonably add that spend to their number. Buyers don’t price it the same way. They compare your home with what else has sold nearby, then check what their lender will give them. Money spent doesn’t always come back pound for pound.

When there’s a higher figure on the table, the difference usually comes down to which sales were used. An average price per square foot sounds scientific. If it’s drawn from sales in the nearest village, where smaller homes always achieve more per square foot, it flatters a large rural house.

For a rural home, the sale that tells the truth is usually another rural home nearby. The closest match in location, type and size. Set against village sales it can look out of line, and surveyors sometimes call a sale like that an outlier. However, leaving out the closest comparable because it messes with the expectation figure is very risky indeed. It’s usually the closest thing to the truth on the table.

That’s why we sense-check every valuation with an independent surveyor we trust before we share it. We’d rather lose an instruction than win it on a number that won’t sell. A home launched too high sits on the market, then comes down, then looks tired to every buyer who scrolls past it. No surveyor’s figure sets the price in the end. A buyer with a lender behind them does.

People still have to move

None of this stops life. Jobs move. Families grow, shrink and scatter to university. Parents need help nearer home. A separation doesn’t wait for the base rate.

Bank Rate has sat at 3.75% since last December and the Bank of England meets again this Thursday. Last week’s Budget has been picked over endlessly. In Scotland, LBTT and ADS are set at Holyrood anyway, so a Westminster Budget rarely changes the sum as much as the headlines suggest. Waiting for the perfect fiscal moment is a bit like waiting for a calm day in November on the North Berwick seafront. Possible. Rare. Not something to plan a move around.

The people who move well in this market aren’t the ones who called it right. They’re the ones who knew their own numbers.

Where we come in

Good representation isn’t persuading a seller to give their home away. It isn’t pushing a buyer past their comfort zone either. It’s understanding both sides well enough to find room neither had spotted.

Price is only one lever. Entry date matters. So does flexibility in the missives, what’s included in the sale and how certain each party can be. A buyer who can’t go higher on price can sometimes move on timing. A seller who won’t drop can sometimes accept a quicker entry that saves them bridging finance or a second set of removal costs.

Our Matchlist means we often know both sides. Quiet Seekers tell us exactly what they need and what they can afford before a home ever reaches the market. That lets us line up the seller’s number and the buyer’s number before anyone is dug in.

It’s also why we ask every seller the same two questions at appraisal. Have you found where you want to go next? What’s the least you’d take? Not the most you’d like. It sounds brutal but what's the figure that makes your next move work.

The goal isn’t to prove who’s right. The market is complicated enough. Our job is to help people find the version of the deal that works for both of them, quietly, before the disagreement gets loud.

If you’d like to work out your own number with us, we’ll come to you. No obligation. No pressure.

Book an appraisal at mowatt.uk/sellers