I sent an investor a deal this week showing a 33% discount.
It was 3%.
Here is what happened, because I think it is the most useful thing I have learned this year about buying property in the North East.
The deal
A three-bed terrace. Two sold comparables on the same street: £118,000 and £85,000. The house I was valuing was smaller — 85 sqm against their 110 and 95.
So I size-adjusted both. That gave me a value of £83,618 against an asking price of £56,000. A 33% discount. On paper, a very good deal.
Then the investor asked one question.
“What did the houses on the same street sell for that are a similar size?”
What I had missed
I went back to the raw records. There were not two sales on that street in the last 12 months. There were three. The third was £67,000 — the most recent, and the cheapest.
It had no floor area recorded on the EPC register, so the system I was using had quietly dropped it, and kept the two biggest houses on the street. The two that made the deal look good.
| Same street | Sold | Price | Size | Adjusted to 85 sqm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comparable one | 27 Feb 2026 | £118,000 | 110 sqm | £91,182 |
| Comparable two | 19 Dec 2025 | £85,000 | 95 sqm | £76,053 |
| The one that was dropped | 10 Apr 2026 | £67,000 | not recorded | cannot be measured |
When I redid it properly — matching on size first, then widening the radius only if needed — I found eleven sales within a quarter of a mile, all between 76 and 93 sqm. Size-adjusted, their lower quartile was £57,725.
The discount was 3%, not 33%.
Why this matters if you are buying from a distance
Two things go wrong when you value a property from a spreadsheet, and both of them flatter the deal.
The comparables are bigger than the house. A 110 sqm house is not a comparable for an 85 sqm house, however close it is. Match the size first. Then the distance. Never the other way round.
The comparables do not say what condition they were in. Land Registry tells you what was paid. It does not tell you whether the house had been refurbished. On some streets in County Durham and Teesside, the gap between a doer-upper and a finished house is two and a half times the price. On one street in Shotton Colliery: a house bought at £32,000 and resold at £76,999. Another bought at £39,999 and resold at £93,330.
Put both of those in a spreadsheet and take a median, and you get a number that describes neither market.
What we do instead
Every property we bring a client is valued the same way:
- Sold comparables from the same street first, then a quarter of a mile, then half a mile — and no further, because prices vary street to street
- Matched on size and property type before anything else
- At least two sold comparables, with a written agent valuation added if a third cannot be found
- Rent evidence from within half a mile, and the actual rent the property is achieving if it is tenanted
If a property cannot be evidenced that way, we do not bring it to you. That is why the list is short.
And if you are ever shown a deal with a big discount, ask one question: what did the similar-sized houses on that street sell for, and when? If the answer is vague, the discount probably is too.