Demand Receipts From Your Beliefs

How many of the things people say about a local property market have ever actually been checked? "Nobody buys flats in this town." "Sellers here never drop their price." Repeated often enough, beliefs like these start to sound like facts, and then they shape how properties get priced and what clients are told.

Most of them can be tested, at least roughly. Registered sales show what actually sold and for how much. Rental records show which units let fast and which sat empty. A belief that holds up against that evidence has earned its place. One that cannot produce any evidence is a guess, which is not the same as being wrong, but it is a long way from being a rule.

The trouble is that a confident belief feels like knowledge from the inside. An agent who is sure flats do not sell may never market one properly, and so never sees one sell, and so the belief keeps proving itself. A landlord convinced that tenants always wreck a place may spend so much energy on suspicion that good tenants simply go elsewhere. Conviction is useful for getting out of bed in the morning. As a pricing tool, it does a lot worse than a printout of last year's registered sales.