Website lists bargains as prices slither downwards

Homebuyers are sniffing out bargains through a new website that monitors every cut in asking prices.

Propertysnake.co.uk lists thousands of houses and flats that have been reduced in price during the current slump.

It gets its name from the snakes and ladders board game - propertysnake being the opposite of the property ladder.

This is the first market downturn in which buyers have been able to use the internet to look for bargains. The world wide web had barely been heard of when the London property market last suffered a slump in the early Nineties.

The website has up to 200 cut-price properties in each of the capital's 260 postcodes, many discounted by 20 per cent or more on the original asking price.

The mortgage crunch and apparent shortage of buyers has forced sellers who need to move quickly to slash prices.

Anthony Bell, branch manager at Bushells estate agents in Streatham, said: "Anything in the £250,000-£300,000 bracket is being reduced to under the £250,000 cut-off point for three per cent stamp duty. I've got 870 properties under £250,000 within half a mile - that's three times as many as last year."

He said "marginal" areas such as Streatham were particularly vulnerable to reductions because buyers could now more easily pick and choose which part of London they wanted to live in.

"It is a funny area. No one wants to live here but they have to. Last year, nobody cared but now they do," he added. Propertysnake shows price-cutting is not confined to the capital's "frontier towns".

Some prime areas of west and central London have seen hundreds of thousands of pounds cut from the prices of houses struggling to sell.

Marsh & Parsons is selling a two-bedroom house in Cromwell Gardens, South Kensington, that went on the market for £1.395 million in October for £1 million, a 28 per cent reduction.

In Shepherd's Bush, a four-bedroom house in Goldhawk Road that went on the market for £1.1 million in January has been reduced by a fifth to £875,000.

Julia Mandrikin, broker at the Shepherd's Bush branch of Faron Sutaria, said: "The vendors first went to £950,000 when they weren't in a rush. Now they've got a property to go to outside London and they want to get a move on.

"A few months ago, we could easily have got £1.05 million to £1.1 million for it."

A rare lodge house at Richmond Lock is under offer at £725,000, having been cut in price by 27 per cent from £995,000 in January.

Robert Pearce, sales director of property investment firm Imagine Private Clients, said: "We put it on at just under £1 million or £1,232 per sq ft, which for Richmond is farcical. We were being brave or cheeky, I suppose, and it didn't pay off."