How to check if a Rightmove asking price is fair

Is there a Rightmove price checker?

Not for a listing. Rightmove has an instant online valuation that estimates what a home is worth from its address, which is built for owners and, as Rightmove says itself, cannot see inside the home. Agents have a Best Price Guide report for pricing a home they are about to list. A buyer looking at a listing gets the asking price and nothing to weigh it against.

So checking a price means gathering the evidence yourself. There are three kinds, and each covers for what the others miss.

1. What has the seller already done to the price?

Start with the listing's own history. A home that came on at £550,000 eight months ago and has been cut twice to £500,000 is a different proposition from one listed at £500,000 last week, and on Rightmove the two look the same: at most a “Reduced” label, with no amounts.

The free Property Track extension shows every change to the asking price, with its date, on the listing and under each search result. Our guide on how to see price history on Rightmove goes through what it tells you.

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2. What are similar homes nearby asking?

Next, the competition. By hand, that is a Rightmove search for the same number of bedrooms within a quarter or half a mile, opened listing by listing. It works, but it is slow, and it cannot tell you which of those homes have had their own prices cut.

The Comparables tab in Property Track Plus, a paid subscription from £4.99 a month, does it on the listing: every home on the market within a quarter, half or one mile with the same number of bedrooms, for sale or to rent, newest first, on a map or as a list. Each shows its latest asking price and whether it has been cut or raised, and from what.

Remember that these are asking prices too. A street where every similar home is priced below the one you are looking at is a question for the agent; a street where half of them have been cut tells you which way sellers are having to move.

3. What did similar homes actually sell for?

Sold prices are the only figures somebody really paid, and they are public, from HM Land Registry. The trouble is getting them into a shape you can use.

Rightmove keeps them in a separate House Prices section, so you leave the listing, type its street or postcode in again and set the filters yourself. What comes back is centred on the place you typed rather than the home you were looking at, address by address, for you to sift for the few sales that are recent enough, near enough and similar enough to matter. Land Registry's own search is plainer still: a form of address fields and a list of dates and prices, with no map, no distances and no floor areas. Our guide to sold prices on Rightmove covers both, and why they run a few months behind.

That is the work Plus does: it puts sold prices in front of the listing they are evidence for. The Recent sales tab starts from the home you are looking at, and shows every sale within a quarter, half or one mile of it in the last six months, newest first, on a map or as a list. Each has its address, its property type, the price paid and how far it is from the listing, and where its energy performance certificate gives one, its floor area.

Floor area is what makes a comparison fair. Two two-bed flats can differ by a third in size, so compare price per square foot, not headline prices: divide each sold price by its floor area, and do the same for the listing, whose size is usually on its floor plan or its energy performance certificate.

4. Which way is the area moving?

Recent sales are a snapshot; the trend says which way to lean. The Trends tab shows the median sold price and the number of sales in the listing's outcode, by property type, for every complete year back to 1995. Prices that have been flat for three years, or sales that have thinned out, give an ambitious asking price less to stand on.

Putting it together

• Cut more than once, and months on the market: the seller is already moving towards the market. The history shows how far they have come.
• Priced above every similar home nearby: there should be a reason you can see, such as size, condition or outside space. If there is not, the price is the reason it is still for sale.
• Price per square foot well above recent sales: the same question, asked of what buyers actually paid.
• Freshly listed, in line with both: there is little room, and a low offer is unlikely to be the one that wins.

None of this is a valuation. It will not tell you about the condition of the home, the length of a lease or what a survey might find, and a mortgage lender will send its own surveyor. What it gives you is what the agent already has: the evidence behind the number.