Valuation brief builder

The appraisal is won before you knock

Comparable sales, the asking-to-sold ratio, letting speed and school catchment assembled for a single address before the appraisal, in place of an evening of tab-switching.

Propalt Team · For estate agents

You already know the walk-around is the easy part. The vendor has invited three agents this week, and the one who wins the instruction is rarely the one who talked most. It is the one who arrived knowing the street, the recent sales and the honest speed of the market. That knowledge used to take an hour of tab-switching the night before. It does not any more.

The old way was to open one portal for comparables, another for sold prices, a council page for schools, and a spreadsheet to reconcile the lot. Fair enough when you had one appraisal that week. When you have five, the brief slips, and you end up quoting a price you cannot evidence in the room. A brief that took an hour should take a question, because the underlying records are the same either way.

The four numbers that hold a valuation up

A valuation you can defend rests on four things: what genuinely comparable properties sold for, how far asking prices are landing from sold prices right now, how long stock is taking to go under offer, and what the catchment looks like for the exact address. Comparable sales set the floor. The asking-to-sold ratio tells you whether the market is paying up or grinding sellers down. Average days to let agreed tells you how quickly the local rental market is clearing, which matters where a vendor is weighing a let against a sale; for the sale itself the equivalent measure is average days to sold subject to contract. The catchment tells you which of those comparables a family will actually pay for.

The figures above are illustrative. The point is that all four sit in the same brief, drawn for the specific property rather than a postcode average, so the price you recommend has a reason attached to every part of it.

From brief to instruction

The vendor does not want a number pulled from the air. They want to see the working. When you can lay comparable sales next to the asking-to-sold ratio, then say how quickly things are agreeing and why the catchment matters for their address, the conversation stops being a negotiation about your fee and becomes a conversation about their property. That is a far better place to be standing.

The agent who arrives with the brief already built is arguing from evidence while the other two are still guessing.

There is a fair objection here: an experienced valuer carries a lot of this in their head. True. But a brief the vendor can see beats a brief the vendor has to trust, and it frees the head knowledge to do what it does best, which is read the room.

Do the reading before the drive, not instead of the pitch.

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Comparable, market and catchment data is drawn from HM Land Registry and the Propalt intelligence layer. Figures shown are illustrative. This article is general information for estate agency professionals.