Local Life - Wigan - August 2020

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Wigan Property News
As I write this piece, it has been just a couple of
weeks since we were given the green light to reopen
the property market along with the rest of England,
and the first signs are remarkable. Wednesday
27 May saw more than six million people visit the
Rightmove website, its busiest day ever.
However the total Wigan housing sold in May 2019
was 320 properties, so you can see we still have
a long way to go before we reach 2019 activity
figures and we won’t fully appreciate the effects the
virus has had on the local property market until we
have some more data to analyse .
New instructions in May 2020 were 179 properties
(compared with 432 new properties in May 2019),
but what was remarkable is that the markets were
only opened on the last week of the month, and
we were still in full lockdown for the first 3 weeks
of May.
The sold figures so far this year from Wigan agents
are buoyant including these properties, some of
which have been sold from our Premier Collection:
£2,500,000 Parbold ~ £1,100,000 Newburgh
£550,000 ~ Gathurst Lane, Shevington
£500,000 Trevore Drive, Standish ~ £485,000 Orrell
Road ~ £360,000 Parkbrook Lane, Shevington
£360,000 Herons Wharf, Appley Bridge~ £350,000
Hall Lane, Aspull ~ £300,000 Lincoln Drive, Aspull
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Choose your Agent Wisely
Here is just one of many reports that illustrate the importance choosing your estate agent wisely.
I went to a traditional bay fronted house on Chorley Road in Standish, which was vacant and in need of a full refurbishment.
My advice to the owner was to invite offers over £140,000. Another local agent, who shall remain nameless, had advised him
to price the house at £155,000.
Long story short, swayed by an optimistic valuation and cheap fees, he took their advice and priced the house at £155,000. Then
after a while dropped the price to £150k. and then to £145,000, and finally took my advice and invited offers over £140,000.
We kept in touch with him over the months and he called one day, saying that the other estate agents had been in touch with
an offer of £135,000 and asked whether I thought he should take it. I told him that if we could not achieve more than £135k we
wouldn’t charge him a single penny.
We sold it in less than 2 weeks for £147,500, £12,500 more than he was about to accept with the other agent.
This is not a one-off, on average we achieve approximately 5% more than this agent. With the average house price in Wigan of
£154,817 that equates to £7,740, which is certainly not chump change these days.
The moral of this story: Don’t be swayed by estate agents offering optimistic valuations and cheap fees -
you could easily end up out of pocket to the tune of thousands of pounds.