By It comes as no surprise to many that house prices vary from region to region. London, for example, which has a sizable prime property sector, is home to some of the most expensive homes in the UK, and data from Savills suggested they have only become more expensive in recent times.
Even so, a majority of Brits have been found unable to assess just how much variance there is in regional house prices, according to a new poll by Housesimple.
The poll, which spoke to 2,000 UK-based adults, found that a surprisingly high number of people couldn’t work out which properties were the most valuable, out of a list of homes across the UK.
Housesimple found that size isn’t necessarily a good indicator for the overall price, meaning a large number of people could be completely unaware of the buying opportunities to be had in a number of regions.
Size isn’t everything
Londoners were found to be the most clueless when it came to guessing what their money could buy them across the UK. Housesimple suggested that high prices in the capital could be distorting a Londoner’s idea of what prices were on a national level.
Housesimple asked respondents to guess whether a four-bedroom barn conversion in Blackburn was more or less expensive than a two-bedroom penthouse in London. As many as 19 per cent wrongly believed the barn conversion was more expensive, probably assuming that size was a factor.
In actual fact, the London-based penthouse was the most expensive of the two, by a considerable margin. The penthouse was worth £2.85 million, but the barn conversion was far more affordable, at just £360,000. A quarter of Londoners were found unable to correctly guess this price mismatch.
Not only that – on a more local level, respondents were shown a five-bedroom property in Norwich and a six-bedroom home just a few miles away, in Suffolk.
Although the two places seemed to be near-identical, the Suffolk-based property was worth two times the value of the Norwich-based house, at a price of £1 million for the former and just £500,000 for the latter. As many as 35 per cent of respondents were caught out by this price comparison.
Local knowledge helps buyers
One of Housesimple’s most intriguing findings from their new survey was evidence which suggested that a bit of local knowledge goes a long way, when trying to guess the intrinsic value of a property.
People based in Leeds were highly accurate in their judgements in particular – 62 per cent of Leeds-based respondents correctly believed a Leeds-based five-bedroom detached property was worth much more than a Nottingham-based three-bedroom detached house.
Looking at the actual prices, the Leeds-based house was worth £400,000, compared to the more affordable price of £180,000 for the property in Nottingham.
Sam Mitchell, SEO of Housesimple, commented: “Property prices are a national obsession, so it’s interesting to see from the results that the majority of Brits may not know what they could get for their money in other parts of the country.
“That’s why we put together a quiz for people to test themselves, when it comes to their knowledge on property costs across the UK. People could be surprised that they can get more for their money elsewhere.”
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