Had two separate estate agents around to value my place today. Quite an informal process, which was something of a shock. I was expecting serious men with measuring tapes, surveying equipment, and so on.

Instead had two quite pleasant chaps over, a couple of hours apart. The valuation consisted of showing them around and stating the obvious; “Yes, this is the bathroom. Here’s a bedroom. Here’s another bedroom” and so on.

After doing a bit of research on the lazyweb I figured that the valuation was going to be in the region of 220-240,000. Turns out 250,000 is more like it — something to do with having 3 double bedrooms, instead of 2 double bedrooms and a box room, which is common for the area. That, and the previous owners had done a bang up job converting the garage in to a playroom for their little girl (which is now doing stirling duty as my office).

Of course, this may cause problems with Persimmon — they want the part-ex property to be at least 30% cheaper than the house we’re buying, which means mine shouldn’t really be valued at more than 236,600 for them to consider it. But I figure (a) there are other developers who are happy with a 20% difference, so 30% isn’t necessarily a hard and fast rule, and (b) we can always horse-trade about this, and try and extract fifteen grand’s worth of upgrades from Persimmon for the new place.

Time will tell.