Online House Price Estimate in UK

Written by Posted On Thursday, 19 September 2019 12:29

In UK there are a large number of real estate companies that offer you property valuation online service. The price of the property is valued based on several factors; at least that’s what they tell us. You can find that with any online estate agent.

There are over a dozen of online house price estimation tools available. Most of these tools will ask you to put in your postcode and the property number. After that, you have to ask a series of questions about the property that will finally churn out the property value. The question that arises is whether these tools are accurate or which one is the most suitable to go with.

We did the research

There was no easy way to find the best tools for property valuation online so we have to get our hands dirty. We chose two properties from the country and pitted them against each other. One of the properties was in Wakefield and the other one in London.

The London property was a three-bed apartment located in one affluent area of the city and was already sold in 2017 for £345,000. While the Wakefield property is a 3-bed family home which has been sold once for £370,000 but is again on the market? However, this particular property has exchanged many hands so there’s little information available for property valuation sites to use.  

Property Price Advice

This property valuation online tool will ask you a lot of questions related to the property because it works on a lot of details. The London property was estimated to be £365,000 which we think is within the reasonable margin of the actual selling price. However, as the property was already sold once, the information helped the tool to calculate the price much more accurately.

Now when we tried to evaluate the Wakefield Property online, it estimated the property at £345,000 which we don’t think was based on the sale price of the property but the local average of the similar properties in the area. The price was significantly lower than we expected it to be. The lack of information about that particular area also played a role in inaccurate evaluation.

Zoopla

Touted as the best property or house valuation online tool, Zoopla makes property valuation look like a ballpark. According to them they use a “secret formula that analyses millions of data points relating to property sales and home features UK wide.” We gave it a try and for the first valuation, we used the London property that it tagged for £335,000, which was in comparison with the Property Price Advice was less accurate. But still, the estimated value was within the error range. However, it was disappointing to see that a website that claims to provide 99.5% accurate online house price estimate missed by such margin.

The Wakefield property saw a property valuation that was only 52% accurate. It was lowered by £124,000 than what was the current sale price. This again pointed out the inaccuracy in using automated software that doesn’t utilize enough details to make a valuation.

Mouseprice

This online property evaluation tool requires you to sign in before you can use it. You can sign in using Facebook or through email. Then you will put in your postcode and select the house that will provide you with a range for the price of the properties, unlike other tools. For the London property, it gave us a value range of £325,000 to £370,000, the real value being £345, 0000. It was well within the price error range. And for the Wakefield property, that has a valuation of £370,000; it provided a range between £320,000 and £390,000.

These are the three property valuation online tools that we reviewed and shared an honest review with you. Online house price estimation tools are handy but we recommend that before you finally try to sell off your house you should get a formal valuation done. Even with most up-to-date data, the tools cannot accurately predict the value of the house you want to sell. If there’s not enough data available about your property then the online tools can fail miserably and you cannot rely on them.

Online house evaluation must be the beginning step of the process of selling a property, but to make that final decision, you need thorough information and planning.

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