Three Price Checks Before You Offer

If you're about to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an investment property, would you trust a single opinion of what it's worth? Most buyers do. They anchor to the asking price, or a lender's number, or an online estimate, and none of those tells the whole story on its own.

Our approach starts with one thorough piece of work, a comparative market analysis, and then pressure-tests it against two independent references. The analysis is the foundation. The other two checks exist to confirm it, and when everything lines up, you can negotiate with real confidence. When something doesn't, that disagreement is often the most valuable information you have.

1. What has the market actually paid?

The best indicator of value isn't an asking price. It's what comparable buyers have recently been willing to pay. That's why every property we assess starts with a comparative market analysis, a CMA. Not listings, not agent opinions. Actual settled sales.

The discipline is in the word comparable. A useful comparable is close (ideally the same pocket of the same suburb), recent, and genuinely like-for-like: similar land size, bedrooms, condition and position. Where a comparable differs from your target, you adjust your thinking rather than pretending the difference away.

One sale tells you very little. That's why we build every CMA on ten comparable sales, and we price-index each one to today's market. A property that sold six months ago, when the market was flat, is not worth the same number today if the market has since run hot. Every comparable is adjusted for the market conditions it sold in, so the pattern you're reading reflects value now, not value then. This is the most thorough piece of work in the whole process, and it's the number we stand behind.

2. What does an independently arranged valuation estimate say?

The second check is a desktop valuation, arranged through a mortgage broker at little or no cost, with no one physically attending the property.

Its value isn't in replicating our analysis, it's in coming from a different source entirely: a lender-facing check, arranged independently of us. If it lands well away from our number, we want to know why before an offer goes in, not after.

3. What does a second data source say?

The third check comes from a data provider we subscribe to, which produces its own automated estimate.

Like the desktop valuation, no one walks the property, and it can't see a fresh renovation or a busy road the same way a person can. What makes it useful isn't a different methodology so much as a different, independently sourced vendor, arrived at without reference to our CMA or the broker's number.

What the three checks are really for

The goal isn't to average three numbers, and it isn't to hunt for a range. The CMA is the work: ten comparables, price-indexed, adjusted line by line. The desktop valuation and the data estimate exist to give us confidence in it. When both independent references support the analysis, we offer from it without flinching.

And when one sits well away from the others, we don't ignore it. We ask why. Sometimes it's outdated data. Sometimes it's a unique feature. Sometimes it's the market quietly telling you something the photos didn't. Either way, that gets resolved before a single dollar is offered.

The asking price is just one opinion

Remember: the asking price wasn't chosen by an independent party. It was chosen by the side trying to achieve the highest possible sale price. That's not a criticism, it's simply how property works. Your job isn't to decide whether the asking price sounds reasonable. It's to independently determine what the property is worth to the market, before deciding what it's worth to you.

That's why we never rely on one opinion. And neither should you.