Asking price vs recorded sale: what counts as price evidence

Write the label on every dollar figure before you compare two properties. Marketing sits above the line. A completed transfer sits below it.

• Asking price. The seller’s figure, or an offers-over figure. It can move during the campaign. It is not a duty to sell.
• Guide or disclosed estimate. A published range or agent estimate. In New South Wales and Victoria this sits inside quoting statutes. In Queensland an auction campaign cannot carry a price guide. Elsewhere it is marketing under Australian Consumer Law. See asking price.
• Rejected written offer. A fact about this campaign, where you know it. Not the next sale price.
• Reported sold price. What a listing or agent says after exchange or settlement. Often right, sometimes rounded, withheld or early.
• Recorded sale event. A settled transfer with a price and a date in a land-registry or valuation-authority record Districts can cite.

A suburb full of optimistic asks looks more expensive than its recorded sales. A suburb where agents publish low guides looks cheaper than the contracts that follow. Analysis built only on asks measures vendor hope. Analysis built only on old recorded sales measures last year’s buyers.

Use the current ask to understand the offer in front of you. Use recorded sales to understand what settled. Keep both labelled. If you average them you have invented a third number that nobody paid and nobody asked.

The register records a consideration and a date. It does not record why the parties traded, what chattels went with the house, whether the buyer and seller were related, or whether the dwelling you see now is the dwelling that sold.

Consecutive recorded sales on the same title tell you hold periods and the change between two buyers. They do not give you an annual growth rate. The difference bundles market movement, any renovation, any change to the lot, and the circumstances of each trade.

A quick resale, a sale well below the previous one, or a long gap is a prompt to look for a story: related-party, condition, a subdivision, or a campaign that failed. Compare the change with other recorded house sales in the same suburb over the same interval. A property that moved differently from its cluster may have a lot-specific explanation. Districts does not publish a per-property growth rate from two transfers.

• Treating an asking price as a data point about value.
• Treating a listing that says sold as a recorded sale before the register shows it.
• Comparing today’s ask with a 2019 recorded sale and calling the gap growth.
• Reading a withheld or missing sold price as a low one.
• Averaging ask and last sale into a “midpoint” and calling that evidence.

Asking prices carry the listing source and date. Sale events carry the sale date, the price and the source, and are shown as source data. Suburb medians are labelled as suburb figures. Nothing is blended into a value. The property prices methodology explains how sale and listing observations are recorded. The facts and calculations principle explains why they stay apart.

The state land registry or valuation authority is the document for the transfer. A conveyancer can obtain a title search showing the last dealing. Where a sold price in a listing matters, check it against the register once it appears. Where a historical sale is used to test a renovation story, line the sale date against building or planning records for the lot. What is recorded, when it is released and whether a price is disclosed differs by state and territory.