Two Apartments One Building, €225,000 Difference In Price. One of Them Is Mine.

The comps post was the theory. 

This is me living it, with the neighbours.

A few weeks ago I wrote about why "comps" don't mean here what they mean back home, and how pricing a flat in Portugal is half arithmetic, half séance. I ended it confessing I was sitting down to price my own place and walking into the same wall as everyone else.

Then the wall walked into me.

I priced my little garden studio in Príncipe Réal at €495,000. 

I did the boring homework: the transaction data for the micro-zone, the local knowledge, an honest look at what the place actually is rather than what I'd like it to be. €495k is my fair number. Not top-of-the-fantasy-range, not money left on the table. Just right.

And then a near-twin came up for sale. Not down the road. Not in the building next door. In my building.
The asking price? €720,000.
That's €225,000 more. Forty-five percent. 

So far neither of us has actually sold yet, so nobody on this street knows who's dreaming.

The part I couldn't have made up

Here's what makes this better than any example I could have invented: the two flats are mirror images. Same floor of the same building, the lower garden level, the cave. Mine is the one on the right, cave direita. Theirs is the one on the left, cave esquerda. Same landing. Same year, 2015. Same footprint, near enough. You couldn't build a cleaner controlled experiment if you kept the two of them in a lab.

This isn't apples to apples. It's the same apple, sliced down the middle, one half priced like a truffle.

So where does a quarter of a million euros hide, between two doors that face each other?

On the raw numbers, theirs has a little more room indoors, around 55 square metres to my 43, plus a 36-square-metre terrace. Mine has less floor inside and a better outside: a 45-square-metre private garden, sun all year, morning coffee to evening light. And the finish? Identical. Both flats were renovated to the same standard at the same time, the air conditioning, the acoustic double glazing, the wooden floors, the lot. You'd never guess that from the listings, mind you.

And before anyone reaches for "but the Airbnb"

Both listings do the little dance. "Yielding asset." "Excellent rentability." 

Mine does it too, I'll own that, because I didn't write the copy and my agent is doing her job. But it's a dance to an empty room. You cannot get a new Alojamento Local licence in Príncipe Real. It's a contention zone. It has been for years, and I've written the whole grim saga of what that means here.

So whatever short-term-rental daydream a listing is quietly selling you, at either price, for either flat, put it down. Neither of us can hand you that licence. It doesn't exist to hand. Which means the €225,000 gap can't hide behind rental income either. There's no cushion under it. There's nothing under it at all.

^{The thing no database can see: sun, a garden you walk straight into, and about four seconds to understand it.}

This is the theatre, and I'm in it now

Remember I said asking prices become theatre the moment you take away the anchor of real sold data? This is the theatre. Live, in my own building, with my own apartment cast as the sensible one and the neighbour cast as the fantasy.

Idealista shows both flats as "T0, ~90m², 2015, Príncipe Real, terrace." Two near-identical rows in a search result. Feed the same listings into Casafari and it'll call them comparable too, which, on paper, they are. 

But no tool on the market can feel how much sun falls on a garden at four in the afternoon. It can't tell a garden you live in from a terrace you visit. It can't weigh the twelve extra metres indoors against the bigger garden outside, or decide which one a buyer actually wants. None of that fits in a field, so none of it gets any weight. Meanwhile the seller across my landing has looked at what a data-blind buyer flying in from Joburg or Surrey might pay for the words "Príncipe Real, ninety square metres, terrace," and priced to the very top of that imagination.

And here's the bit that should worry you if you're the one buying. If that €720,000 flat sells to someone who came for a long weekend and decided the number "felt about right," that number becomes the comp. The next seller points to it. My €495,000, the researched one, the true one, starts to look like I'm giving the place away. The lie sets the price. 

The honest number looks like the mistake.

What I'm not going to do

Chase it. I'm not going to nudge my price up to match a neighbour's wishful thinking, because that is the exact behaviour that has been inflating this whole market for a decade, and I've spent four posts telling you not to fall for it. It would be a bit rich to fold the first time it got tempting.

And I won't pretend I know for certain who's right. Maybe the €720,000 flat sells for €720,000. Stranger things have happened here, and that is precisely the problem, nothing anchors it. But I'd put money on mine selling closer to its fair number, and selling faster, to someone who stood in that garden in the afternoon sun and understood, in about four seconds, exactly what they were paying for.

What this means for you, practically

Two listings that look like twins on a portal, same building, same floor, same year, same finish, can still be priced a quarter of a million euros apart, and the number will not tell you why. One might get sun all day and the other none. One might have a garden you live in and the other a terrace you visit. The portal shows you the same tidy little row for both, and leaves you to guess what's real.
So go and stand in each of them. 

Ask the question I keep banging on about: not "what are similar flats listed for," but "what have units in this exact building actually sold for, and what were they, exactly, floor, light, condition, outdoor space?" If your agent can only answer with a shrug and a portal search, that's useful information too. About the agent.

The honest bit

I am selling one of these two flats. I have skin in this, and you should always know that when you read someone in my position. But that is rather the whole point of this blog. 

I'd rather show you the machinery from the inside, my own building, my own price, my own hand held firmly off the panic button, than hand you a tidy theory from across the room.
Two flats. One building. Same floor, mirror images of each other, €225,000 apart. Only one of those two prices is telling the truth, and no database on earth can tell you which.
I can, though. That's rather the job.

I'm Moira. I've bought, sold, rented out, and Airbnb'd more Portuguese properties than I care to count, and right now I'm selling a garden studio in Príncipe Real and resisting the urge to price it like the neighbours.

I write Portugal Horizon to help fellow South Africans, along with the Brits, the Americans, and anyone else dreaming of a life here, avoid the mistakes I've already made on your behalf. 

You're welcome.