How Can a Property’s Sales History Impact a Sale?
A property owner contacts your real estate business with an incredible proposition for your team. She wants to sell her home — an enormous, recently renovated single-family residence in a desirable neighborhood — as quickly as possible and is willing to accept the first offer from a buyer.
There’s no reason why your agents can’t sell this property, right?
A scenario like this requires you to put on your detective hat, visit the home, and then research its property sales history. Perhaps the house sold for well below its asking price just a few years ago, indicating something’s wrong with the property. Or maybe sales history records show that the home has been bought and sold multiple times in a short period, suggesting that not everything is what it seems.
Perhaps that proposition is too good to be true.
In this post, learn the importance of searching property sales history and how a tool like ProspectNow can simplify the process.
What Is Property Sales History?
Property sales history records uncover insights into how a residential or commercial unit has performed in the past. You can find out:
- When developers built a property
- The first person who owned the property
- Other people who owned the property since then
- How much money each owner paid for the property
- Whether the property underwent refinancing
- Whether the property underwent major renovations or structural repairs
Think of a property sales record as a historical account of a property’s performance.
Why Search for Property Sales History?
As a real estate business, searching property sales history should be at the top of your to-do list when someone approaches you about selling their residential or commercial unit. Reviewing property sales history can help you:
Value a Property
Use any previous valuations for a property to influence its current asking price. Sales records let you see how much a previous owner paid for the property, and you can adjust the last sold price to suit current market conditions.
Improve Service
Potential buyers often have many questions about the state or quality of a property. For example, an interested party might want to know about previous owners and whether those owners renovated the property. Sales records provide this information, helping you improve service and increase trust among potential buyers.
Advertise the Property
Sales records also tell you how long a property stayed on the market before a previous owner purchased it. If the property sold quickly in the past, you can include this information in listings and encourage potential buyers to place an offer on the property if interested. If a property has undergone significant repairs since it was last on the market, including this information in listings could speed up closing times. A recently renovated property will not only attract more potential buyers but could justify a higher asking price than other residential or commercial units in the neighborhood.
Improve the Property
Sales records might indicate that a property took a long time to sell in the past. That suggests a problem that the current owner hasn’t told you about. Find out why the property stayed on the market for so long and, if the issue relates to repairs or structural damage, encourage its owner to make any repairs. If the owner doesn’t want to pay for repairs, you might both agree to lower the asking price or take the property off the market.
How to Search Property Sales History
There are two main ways to search property sales history in your region:
- Accessing local government records
- Accessing online property databases
Local Government Records
Every local government stores sales records for properties sold in their jurisdiction. These documents might span hundreds of years. You can access sales records from City Hall or the county courthouse in your nearest big city — the same place where you’ll find other archives, such as title deeds and tax records. Depending on the jurisdiction, accessing local government property records can be time-consuming. Many understaffed local governments are busy with other tasks, and you might have to physically visit a government building to pick up the records you need.
Online Property Databases
Various online property databases store sales records. You typically need to pay a fee to access this data. The problem with online property databases is that some records are incomplete or out-of-date, resulting in errors when valuing, advertising, or improving a property.
There is an alternative way to access a comprehensive property sales history.
Use ProspectNow for Property Sales History
The easiest way to search for and access sales records is with a complete property and owner database like ProspectNow, which lists data for every property in America. You can unearth information that might positively or negatively impact a sale and use these insights to match more buyers with sellers and close deals.
The amount of information available on ProspectNow is vast. Along with property sales history, you can access comparables, market fit, detailed ownership, and loan origination information in one system. That gives you a 360-degree overview of every property that enters your portfolio. You don’t need to search local government records at your nearest county courthouse or pay to access out-of-date and unreliable websites.
You can even use ProspectNow to predict when new properties will hit your market. The machine-learning-based platform uses predictive analytics, helping you identify properties that might sell or undergo refinance in the next 12 months. Since 2008, ProspectNow has helped more than 33,000 real estate companies worldwide.
Final Word
Property sales history reveals previously unknown insights about new properties in your region. Learn about a property’s previous owners, how long that property stayed on the market in the past, and whether a building has undergone any repairs or major renovations. All this data identifies factors that might impact a sale, allowing you to take quick action for more deal-closing opportunities.
With ProspectNow, every property in America is at your fingertips. Start your free trial and pull information about properties in your target market!