Beware of free online property valuations

Permalink: Beware of free online property valuations
by Brian Turner

I’ve received no less than 2 Press Releases today - both of which from property websites that claim to offer to free estimated valuations of residential property.

The result of checking these? That they both have a long way to go.

Zoopla.co.uk

Aside from the poor name, the search interface is relatively free and easy to use.

The problem is significant - all the site appears to be doing is taking last sale price, and adding the regional average on top for current evaluation.

However, I can tell you that local variations in price activity can be extreme within any region - so applying generic figures just doesn’t work.

The result is that the site wasn’t even useful for providing a guide price, because of it’s generic attempt to apply generic information despite specific criteria.

Despite creating an account and playing around (you didnt have to confirm your email address, so the site may fall foul of anti-spam rules) it looks as though the only way Zoopla is going to work is if they can get a lot of people to simply provide specific property pricing information to them for free.

Maybe it’s a workable business model in the long run, but at this stage, I’m skeptical.

To be honest it’s primary purpose seemed to be as an email marketing portal - take user details, and market at them with sales and offers. No real incentive, and I immediately unsubscribed around 5 marketing options they’d set up automatically on my account.

Mouseprice.net

Another site that suggests estimates - only this time you can’t see anything without signing up with your email address.

This time the email list is double opt in - which means having to wait for the confirmation email to come through - before you can proceed.

Still, it does use Microsoft’s Virtual Earth to provide views of - the wrong properties.

Despite trying to provide an exact aerial photo from Microsoft’s services of the property your exploring, every time I tried it, it always highlighted a completely different property, and usually not even a property on the same street.

And as with Zoopla, all it does is provide generic guesses, expecting users to individually provide property pricing information for them.

Overall

The two sites above are only in beta, so to be fair, there’s every expectation that they may have issues.

However, the idea of either being able to provide a useful free property evaluation I don’t think is being properly served at all.

In fact, after surfing them, I would definitely recommend against using them in their current state, because the last thing someone considering selling their property needs is bad guidance on price to start with.

In which case, in failing to provide the basic service they are advertising, the only business model left to them is to get lots of people to sign up to the service, then sell property services to them.

Perhaps that’s the goal in the first place - provide a gimmick, then chase after with sales.

In either case, this model just doesn’t suggest itself to be useful to potential property sellers, and in fact could simply add to confusion in the market if property buyers were to consider such sites a useful guide.