Everyone wants a below market value deal.
After all, locking in profit at the point of sale is one of the best ways to do well in property.
One way of finding motivated sellers is to find properties that have been reduced on Rightmove or finding properties that are slow moving. Even better if you find both.
If a slow moving property has been reduced it’s likely the property has not had enough interest and the seller is more willing to negotiate.
For a quick summary, the answer is:
- Use the Property Log Chrome Extension
Using Rightmove To Find Reduced / Slow Properties
Ok so technically Rightmove does show reduced properties and listing dates. But it’s not the most helpful.
What You Can Do On Rightmove
On Rightmove, you can sort by oldest listing to find old listings, which is helpful to find slow moving properties.
Rightmove will also say when a property was last reduced if it is a reduced listing.
Limitations of Rightmove
On Rightmove, you can’t sort or filter by ‘reduced’ properties.
And you might miss slow moving properties if you sort by the oldest listings because Rightmove treats it as a new listing if it has been reduced.
Even if it does show reduced properties it won’t show you all the data that you want.
For example, on Rightmove it will just say ‘reduced on …’ without telling you when it had been originally listed and at what price.
So if you’ve not seen the listing before and you’ve not been tracking it you won’t know any of the details.
Rightmove won’t tell you when the property was first listed, how much it was reduced by or whether it has been reduced multiple times before.
All you get is the most recent price after the reduction and the date it was reduced.
But you need more info to make a thought-out offer.
As an example, let’s say a property has been listed for 6 months but was reduced today.
If you used the ‘sort by newest listed’ feature on Rightmove, this 6-month-old property will show up as one of the newest listings as it was ‘reduced today’.
Let’s give you 2 examples to demonstrate this…
We will assume both example properties have had their most recent reduction on the same day.
Example Property 1: Newer Listing, 1 Reduction
- Been on the market for 1 month
- Just had its first reduction of £5000 from the original listing price
- Current price is £200,0000
Example Property 2: Older Listing, Multiple Reductions
- Been on the market for 6 months
- Has been reduced 2 times before by £10,000 each time
- Just had its most recent (third) reduction of an additional £10,000. Is now reduced by £30,000 from its original listing price
- Current price is £200,000
Which one of these sellers do you think is more open to negotiating on offers?
Clearly it’s likely to be the seller of property number 2.
Their property is slow to sell and their previous reductions haven’t helped them.
But on Rightmove, all you’d see from these two properties is that both have just been reduced on the same day and both are priced at £200,000.
Even if seller 2 is not open to negotiating further it’s probably more likely to be a below market value deal seeing as it’s been reduced quite a bit already. (Unless they just listed it at a completely stupid price to begin with.)
Luckily there’s a tool that can show you the hidden info that you need…
It’s called Property Log.
Use Property Log Instead
Property Log is a Chrome Extension (so you can only use it if you use the Google Chrome browser).
Here are the links to its page on the Chrome web store and the property log website.
When you use it you’ll see:
- How long the property has been on the market.
- The original listing date and price
- Every successive reduction or price change along with the date.
This makes it so much more useful than Rightmove on its own.
Using Property Log is free with some limits and after a certain amount of searches the results will be blurred out.
If this happens it means you’ve reached your usage limit (it’s unclear exactly what the usage limit is).
To get unlimited usage you need to pay just £2.99 per month.
If you’re constantly looking for deals and looking for old or reduced properties then this is definitely worth it.
While there are other Chrome Extensions and tools that tell you data about properties on Rightmove, none that I’ve used show you the pricing/listing history with the accuracy of Property Log.
This is why it’s on our list of essential tools for deal sourcers.
You could also use the Property Market Intel Chrome Extension, but when I last checked it showed how long a property had been on the market based off the last reduced date if it had been reduced.
So it’s no better than Rightmove in that regard.
Further Reading
Just remember there are also other ways to find motivated sellers that you should be aware of.
For example, if you’re confident enough to deal with some of the potential pitfalls, then finding repossession properties is one way of getting a good deal on a property.