Asking price, comparable price and sale price are three different things

It is the number in the listing: chosen by the seller, alone or with advice, and not validated by a completed transaction. The market includes properties priced realistically and properties that remain available precisely because the asking price is wrong.

An asking-price index measures advertised supply, not completed transactions. It is useful for understanding how an area is being positioned. It is not enough to value a specific property.

The useful exercise is to identify which properties genuinely compete with this one, here and now. That is rarely the municipality as a whole. It is the group of homes a buyer with this budget and these criteria is likely to compare within the same search.

That requires manual judgement. Two nearby streets can produce a different competitive set. A flat in a building with a lift and one without may not compete in the same way, even when the addresses are close.

This is the price recorded when a transaction completes. It is the closest measure of what actually happened, but the least accessible at the level of an individual decision: the available information tends to be aggregated and delayed rather than available for an exact comparable at the moment it is needed.

The gap between asking price and sale price is not a fixed percentage. It varies with the property, time on market, the strength of buyer interest and how realistic the initial asking price was. A blanket percentage is not evidence.

Setting a price solely from local asking prices means using other sellers' intentions as the benchmark. Some are realistic, some are not, and an index does not distinguish between them.

The useful work sits in the middle: identify the genuine competition, understand where this property fits within it and make the pricing decision from that evidence. It takes longer and does not collapse into a neat round number, but it answers the question that matters to an owner: where should this property sit against the alternatives?