Posts tagged ‘Value estimates’
Property millionaire or thin air?
Price tag: £40 million, nine bedrooms, The Bishops Avenue, London
Years of booming house prices resulted in the creation of many ‘property paper millionaires’ who experienced rocket propelled property values and membership to the exclusive ‘property millionaires club’.
However this club has just shed a load of members…99,538 to be precise, leaving only 183, 630 today. That’s a 35% drop since November 2007 or another way of looking at it is 1 in 97 properties was valued at over £1 million two years ago but today that figure stands at just 1 in 150.
The hardest hit has been the North East; losing 83% of property millionaires in the past two years. Wales has also been hard hit, losing 56% of its property millionaires over the same period.
No surprise though that, despite the decline in house prices, certain parts of the country remain awash with property millionaires, notably London and the South East, where 81% of all million pound homes can be found.
The capital is home to 57% of all property millionaires, with the largest share residing in Kensington (W8) where 48% of all properties are worth over £1 million. Outside the capital, Virginia Water in Surrey leads the property millionaire stakes, with 28% of homes in the area worth more than a million pounds, compared to a national average of just 0.88%.
Click here for regional breakdown and areas with highest proportion of property millionaires.
FIVE PROPERTIES UNLIKELY TO FALL BELOW THE THRESHOLD ANY TIME SOON
1. £25.9m Courtenay Avenue, Highgate, London
4. £15m Henstridge Place, London
5. £12.5m Clifton Hill, London
Tony Blair to sell his one time constituency home
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is to sell his onetime constituency home Myrobella House in Trimdon Colliery, Durham – the county which we recently revealed as the slowest recovering area in Britain, seeing values grow by only 1.1% since March of this year.
According to the Daily Mail, TB paid £30,000 for the property back in 1983 and the four bedroomed detached house is now being marketed for £300,000 through local agents Robinsons.
It appears TB is beating the current market with this property. If we look at the Zoopla! Zed-Index (the average home value in a given area based on current Zoopla! Estimates) for Trimdon Colliery it’s £153,930 for a detached house, which suggests that Blair’s home is likely to be one of the larger, if not largest on that street. Here’s a map view of Trimdon Colliery.
Since stepping down as leader of the Labour party in June 2007 TB has become somewhat of a property collector with a stunning country pad in Buckinghamshire: The South Pavilion in Wotton Underwood which set him back £4m, and the well documented purchase of Connaught Square, Central London which cost £3.6m in 2004 and we now value at £4.6m.
So, when he agrees a sale of Myrobella House we believe he’ll add to his portfolio of stunning properties – maybe an overseas purchase?
Oh and if you were wondering what Myrobella is – it’s a variety of plum.
Market overview for Trimdon Colliery
Market overview for Wotton Underwood
Market overview for Connaught Square, W2
Are we on the (long and winding) road to recovery?
Whilst we are still a long way from the values seen before the credit crunch hit, house values appear to have begun a journey on the road (albeit a long one) to recovery.
Since March of this year the total value of the UK housing market has gained £250 billion – great news for homeowners and also means there will be fewer homeowners experiencing negative equity than there were six months ago.
This now takes the total value of the UK residential housing stock to a whopping £5.25 trillion, up over £250 billion (five times the wealth of Mr Bill Gates according to the new Forbes 400 list) from the recent lows in March this year; this figure still remains well below the market peak of over £6 trillion achieved in late 2007.
It’s all very well shouting about eye watering figures, but here at Zoopla.co.uk we’re more interested in telling you what this means for the value of YOUR home on YOUR street. On average the value of your home is likely to have risen £57 per day since March or just over £10,400 in six months – taking the value of the average British home to £203,622.
Whilst these figures are encouraging, and will come as a welcome relief to many homeowners, the figures are still down £31,592 from the December 2007 peak, when the average British house price stood at £235,214.
Home values in England are now up 2.23% since the start of the year and are beginning to recover even faster in Scotland with an increase of 5.25% since January. Average home values in Wales, however have been the slowest to show signs of improvement, up 0.95% in 2009.
If you live in Windsor & Maidenhead you have the biggest reason to celebrate – prices in this area over the last six-months have roared back by over 10.2%. However those living in Durham have less to cheer about as values in this area are the slowest recovering seeing values grow by only 1.1% since March and those living in Stroud in Gloucestershire where property values have fallen a further 3.7% since March are yet to experience any sort of recovery.
So, the next six months will be crucial in determining whether this slow recovery is here to stay or the beginning of a second dip. In the meantime don’t forget to claim your home and monitor the current value of your home on Zoopla.co.uk!
For more best performing and slowest recovering areas and towns, click here.
How to make Zoopla! estimates more accurate
How can you make Zoopla! estimates more accurate? Simple: give us more details about any UK home – like the number of bedrooms or bathrooms it has, or if it has a garden or patio.
The Zoopla! algorithm has been engineered to work well even when there’s a shortage of facts and figures, to learn and adapt quickly when new information becomes available, and to use that new information to offer increasingly accurate value estimates. So the more information we have, the better it works – the algorithm thrives on rich data.
Adding property data on Zoopla!
While we already have great information about many millions of properties, we also lack data on millions more.
For example, the Registers of Scotland doesn’t record the property type with the transaction records. So Zoopla! may know that the property two doors down from your terraced home just sold, but we don’t know that it’s a carbon copy of your place, because we don’t know that it’s terraced and has the same number of beds and baths. Until users edit the data to tell us that all the other houses on the street are terraced, Zoopla! can’t use the information it does know to the fullest extent possible to value this and all the other properties more accurately.
Filling in all the details on your street won’t affect estimates immediately. But as that information percolates through the system, you can expect to see changes in a few days. Try it out, and see what happens.
So please tell us if all the houses on your street are semi-detached. Tell us your mum’s place has 4 beds; tell us the flat upstairs has 2 baths. Every piece of information users like yourselves provide enhances the accuracy and quality of information for the entire Zoopla! community.
Three Ways To Add Property Data
1) Use our quick Edit feature in either the Home Values or Sold Prices channels
2) Refine an existing estimate for a property
3) Use the Get Estimate feature for properties with no current published estimate
And last but not least, spread the word. If you know people that would benefit from this service, get them to find out what their place is worth and contribute to the model. From small acorns…
