i
A valuation is a forecast, not a compliment.
The number that flatters you in the kitchen is the number that sits on a portal for ninety days and then gets cut in public.
No charge · about an hour
A partner walks it with a tape, then writes to you with one number and the nine sales it rests on. Not a range, not a bracket, and not a figure chosen to win the instruction.
What you get
The same for a village house and an estate
Measured rather than inherited: we do not copy the last agent’s floor area, and we write down the things that will come up in a survey.
One number, the guide we would print, and the week we would launch. Emailed the same afternoon if you would rather not wait for the post.
Nine sales within a mile and eighteen months, with what each achieved and how long it took. You can check every one of them.
Before you ask
Most vendors invite three agents. Ours is usually the middle figure, and about a third of the time it is the lowest. Four reasons we do not fix that.
i
The number that flatters you in the kitchen is the number that sits on a portal for ninety days and then gets cut in public.
ii
Those are the weeks when every registered buyer looks. A house still on the list in week nine is read as a house with something wrong with it.
iii
Ask both for the sales behind the figure. The one that cannot list nine is guessing, and you will pay for the guess in time.
iv
Twice last year the honest advice was to wait for the spring catalogue, and both vendors did. The figures behind that advice are printed in the half-year report.
Before we come
Ten minutes, and most of it is in a drawer
Even the ones drawn for the extension in 2004. We measure anyway, but they tell us what has changed.
Three dates. They are the first three questions a surveyor asks in week ten.
A strip maintained by a neighbour, a gate that has always been left open, a hedge moved by agreement.
A let guest house or a shared access changes the guide, and it is better in the particular than in the contract pack.
It decides the launch week more than anything else on this list.
None of it is required, and we will value the house without any of it. Each one moves the number.
Ask for a valuation
Tell us where the house is and roughly when you are thinking. We will suggest two times, one of them in the evening.