If you have typed your address into one of those free online valuation tools, you have probably already noticed the problem. The number it gave you for your Roleystone home either felt far too low, or suspiciously high, and either way it did not feel right.
There is a reason for that. Roleystone is one of the worst places in Perth to trust an automated valuation, and I can prove it with a home I sold here.
After more than two decades selling across the Hills, and more than 1,500 sales since 2002, I have watched these online estimates get Roleystone wrong over and over again. Not by a little. Sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here is why, and here is how you actually find out what your home is worth.
Why the online number is almost always wrong in Roleystone
An automated valuation works by looking at recent sales of similar homes nearby and doing the maths. In a suburb full of near identical brick and tile houses on near identical blocks, that can get reasonably close, because there are plenty of genuine comparable sales to work from.
Roleystone is the complete opposite of that.
Almost no two properties here are the same. One block is steep and treed, the next is flatand cleared. One home is on scheme water, the next runs off a bore and rainwater tanks. One has a valley view that buyers will pay a fortune for, the one next door looks straight into the hill behind it. There are sheds with three phase power, workshops, studios, and homes built in ways you simply do not see down on the flats.
An algorithm cannot see any of that. It does not know the land is useable rather than a cliff. It does not know there is a forty foot shed with power. It cannot stand on the veranda and see the sunset. So in a suburb like ours, where the value lives almost entirely in the things a computer cannot measure, the online number is little more than a guess dressed up as a figure.
A real Roleystone example
Here is the one that shows it best.
I sold a home here in Roleystone, just off the Brookton Highway. The automated valuation system put it at $380,000.
It was nothing like a standard home. It was a pole log build, sitting in amongst the trees, with wonderful views and a beautiful veranda you could sit out on and watch the sunsets. The closest thing I can compare it to is something out of Margaret River. It was absolutely
stunning, and it was completely unlike the brick and tile homes the computer was comparing it against.
We put it on the market from $550,000. The marketing campaign pulled so much inquiry in the first 24 hours that we lifted the starting figure to $600,000. It sold for $670,000.
That is $290,000 above what the automated system said the home was worth. Not because anyone got lucky, but because the value of that property lived entirely in the things no database will ever hold: the build, the setting, the trees, the views, the feel of the place when a buyer walked in. A computer was never going to get within a bull’s roar of it.
What an algorithm cannot see, and what Roleystone buyers actually pay for
The cruel irony is that the things online tools miss are the exact things Roleystone buyers care most about. When I appraise a home here, these are the value drivers I am weighing up, and not one of them is in any automated model:
- The land itself: how big it is, how much of it is genuinely useable, steep against flat,
cleared against treed. - Water: scheme water, a bore, rainwater tanks, or some combination.
- Views and aspect, and what the home does with them.
- Sheds, workshops, studios and outbuildings, and crucially whether they have power and what they are actually good for.
- Access: sealed or unsealed, the driveway, how far the home sits back.
- The build itself. Non standard homes like pole, log, mud brick or rammed earth confuse an algorithm completely, because it has nothing to compare them to.
- The bushfire rating, the privacy, and the simple feel of standing on the block.
Two homes on the same street, on paper almost identical, can sell hundreds of thousands of dollars apart because of these things. That is the Roleystone market. It rewards properties that are special, and it punishes any attempt to value them off a spreadsheet.
Why getting the number wrong costs you either way
Trusting the online figure is not a harmless shortcut. It costs you in both directions.
Price off a low estimate, and you can hand away tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, the way that pole log home would have if the owner had believed the $380,000. Price off an inflated one, and your home sits on the market, goes stale, and buyers start to wonder what is wrong with it. By the time you correct it, you often end up taking less than you would have if you had priced it properly from day one.
Either way, the cause is the same: someone was not honest about the number. A real valuation is not the highest figure you can be told to win your business. It is the right one, from someone who has actually stood on blocks like yours and sold them.
So how do you actually find out what your Roleystone home is worth?
You get someone to come and stand on it.
A proper appraisal means walking the land, looking at the shed, checking the water, seeing the views, understanding the access and the build, and knowing from real experience what Roleystone buyers will pay for all of it. That is not something that can be done from a desk,
and it certainly cannot be done by a website.
It is also where the right strategy earns its money. That pole log home did not reach $670,000 by accident. You get your best price by creating genuine competition between buyers who want the property, which is exactly what our Select Date Sale® method is built to do. The starting figure is not the finishing figure when the campaign is run properly.
We have sold across Roleystone and the wider Hills for more than two decades, we hold a 4.9 star rating on Google across more than 160 reviews and 4.9 on RateMyAgent, and we will give you an honest figure rather than the one that sounds nicest.
Find out what your home is really worth
If you want to know what your Roleystone property is genuinely worth in today’s market, not what a website guessed, get a proper appraisal before you make any decisions.
It is free, there is no pressure, and you can cancel at any time and only pay for the marketing actually spent if you ever do list with us. Just a straight, experienced opinion on what your home is worth and what it would take to get you there.
Call the office on 08 6254 6333, or get in touch with me directly.
Truth. Strategy. Sold.
Book your free appraisal today.
This article is general information based on more than two decades of selling property in the Perth Hills. It is not formal valuation or financial advice. Every property is different, and the figures in the example above relate to one specific sale. For a figure you can rely on, get an appraisal of your own home.
