If you want to have a better than average chance of success at auction, you really need to become familiar with the environment and psychology of auctions before the big day.
Auctions are a ‘pressure cooker’ of emotions and buyers need to be prepared, particularly if you want to stay in control. Put simply, auctions are highly emotional environments where a bidder's focus, reason and common sense can easily be lost momentarily costing them thousands.
The new changes to the auction system are due to come into effect on the first of January. They have been designed by the Office of Fair Trading to stop underquoting. But will they really work? Well we are less than four weeks away and yet it appears to be ‘business as usual’. Let me explain.
Last year St George Bank surveyed 1000 prospective buyers and found that auctions were still getting the better of them. They found that prior to attending an auction 51% experience anxiety and 48% said it had a negative impact on their sleep patterns.
In addition, 62% of home buyers admitted they didn’t have a strategy in place when attending an auction with almost half (48%) not being as prepared as they could be prior to auction day.
With auctions becoming more and more popular in Sydney and Melbourne, I thought I’d offer my advice on the “rights” of the highest bidder when a property is passed in.
Clearly efforts to stamp out underquoting have essentially failed and the current system is not working. I commend Premier Mike Baird’s recent decision to take a stand over this cruel, misleading and deceptive practice. However I don’t believe the proposed measures to make the advertised price and the price guide that’s put on the selling agency agreement to the vendor, one and the same, will be very effective.
All you need for a property to sell for a silly price at auction is to have two poorly researched, emotional buyers who get carried away with their bidding and I suggest that you don’t be one of them.
Unfortunately this scenario happens all too often. As soon as searching for a property becomes a major chore people tend to start cutting corners on the research that’s needed just to get the process over and done with. If you do this then you are likely to overpay.”
On Saturday I witnessed two auctions that were marketed in two different ways which resulted in very different outcomes.
The first property was advertised with a fairly typical auction marketing campaign which included the usual underquoting. The price guide that was provided throughout the marketing campaign was $1.050m. At auction the bidding ran out of steam short of the reserve. The agent came and told me he needed more money to get it on the market as the reserve was $1.250m. I said "best of luck as you won't be getting that out of me".
When the bidding stalls at an auction, the selling agent and their assistants will often go around cajoling bidders to raise their bids. This is known as “working over the buyers”.
According to news reports it looks like the ban on price guides for properties up for auction in Queensland will go ahead when parliament sits in May - with one minor amendment. Vendors and selling agents will still be able to categorise the property in a price bracket for buyers searching on real estate websites.
I received a huge amount of phone calls and emails of support following my last blog “bringing down the hammer on dodgy auction price guides”. So I have decided to get serious and campaign for real change in the “for sale by auction process” by asking the Minister responsible to make it a legal requirement to publish the reserve price seven days prior to any auction.