Why Isn't My House Selling?
Why Isn't My House Selling?
Your house has been on for weeks, maybe months - and the viewings have gone quiet. Before you drop the price, it is worth understanding what is actually going on out there.
We spend a lot of time talking to other property people. Agents, solicitors, surveyors across Edinburgh and East Lothian. The conversation you get from them off the record is a fair bit more honest than the one you get at a valuation appointment, so here is the useful version.
Nobody is expecting a sudden turn
Summer has been busier than usual for some. There was a brief flurry when the geopolitical picture looked like it might settle, then it went quiet again. Confidence is fragile right now and it moves on headlines rather than fundamentals.
What that means for you: waiting for the market to rescue a sale is not a plan. It is a hope.
There are plenty of homes. Not enough of the right ones
Supply is running ahead of demand, so buyers have options and they are using them. They are also doing the maths before they book a viewing in a way they simply were not during Covid. LBTT, ADS, the cost of moving, the cost of everything else underneath it.
Some who paid heavily over Home Report in 2021 are now finding the numbers do not stack. That sits behind a lot of current buyer caution, whether it gets said out loud or not.
What that means for you: your buyer is arriving cautious. Anything that gives them a reason to hesitate will be taken.
What is moving, and what is stuck
Ask any agent and you get the same list.
●Turn-key homes are still selling. Buyers cannot absorb renovation costs on top of everything else.
●Anything needing work is sticking. Sometimes for months.
●The £400,000 to £600,000 bracket is holding up. That is where the activity is.
●The £1m end is slower. Long and quiet.
●Overpricing gets spotted straight away. Buyers walk before they ever make an offer.
The bit worth knowing before you take a valuation
Here is the thing nobody will lead with.
A high valuation is very easy to give. It is flattering, it wins the instruction and it costs the agent nothing on the day. What it costs is yours, four months later, when the reductions start.
Plenty of good agents are now going the other way on purpose. They will pitch below what you have in your head, not because your home is worth less, because a lower entry point brings more people through the door and a competitive close does the rest.
A seller with £550,000 in mind. Go out at £495,000. It lands under a search filter it would otherwise miss, more people view, and the closing date takes over. It might not reach £550,000. It will almost certainly get nearer than an offers-over figure that put everyone off in week one.
A seller expecting £1.1m. Go out at £975,000. That single figure shifts the home out of the over a million bracket and into one buyers will at least look at. At the top of the market, getting looked at is most of the battle.
The old five to ten percent over Home Report is not something to plan around any more. It still happens. It is no longer the rule.
What that means for you: if one agent's number is a lot higher than the others, ask them to explain how they get you there. The answer tells you a great deal.
The question behind all of it
Here is what we would want to know if we were you. Not what your home is worth. Who is going to buy it.
That is the whole problem with the standard approach. You list, you wait and you find out who your buyer was only after months of exposure have quietly worn the price down. The buyer was invisible the entire time you were paying for the privilege of looking for them.
So we do it the other way round. Quiet Seekers are buyers advertising anonymously exactly what they are after. Location, budget, type of home, what they will genuinely move on. It sits out in the open, so you can look at real demand instead of guessing at it.
Which means you can find out whether your buyer already exists before you commit to anything. No listing. No photographer. No five months on a portal. Matchlist is what joins the two ends together, so when a Hush Home comes to us, we already know who it fits.
One last thing, if you are downsizing
The reason the top of the market is frozen is not marketing.
Downsizers cannot find the smaller home, and what does exist they are competing for against younger families. So they stay put, the larger home never comes up, the chain never forms. No amount of advertising fixes that.
It is why our first question is never are you thinking of selling. It is have you found where you want to go next?
If you are weighing it up
Most agents will tell you to hold until September, when the autumn market wakes up. Fair enough.
We would say use the time. Talk to us before you list and let us work out whether your buyer is already out there waiting.
