Persistence and patience pays off

Eight months of patience and negotiation certainly pays off. We inspected a quietly-listed property earlier this year which my clients loved. We made the vendors a fair offer through their agent however we then discovered the vendor wanted a silly price, much more than the selling agent led us to initially believe so we said "we like it but not at that price".

The agent said “it’s worth it” and I just smiled and said “do you really think that?” He went silent for a minute and then told me that perhaps it wasn’t worth quite that much but that it was a great property with loads of potential.... Upon further questioning I gathered that the vendor had formed his wanted price based on the feedback from several selling agents on what they said they could get for him if he gave them the chance to sell it.

Telling a vendor their property is worth more than it really is, is called "buying the listing". Essentially the selling agent tells the vendor what they want to hear in order to get a signed Selling Agency Agreement. Then once the vendor is locked in the agents tell them the truth about their property’s value. Unfortunately it happens a lot.

In this case it appears that the vendor was either stubborn and wasn't prepared to listen to the market or realised that the selling agents' sale guide wasn’t accurate. Either way, after a few months he withdrew the property from sale. The vendor then waited about four months (as we did) and then put it back on the market with a new selling agent, up for auction this time!

The selling agent encouraged us to buy it a few days before auction at $2.350m. My clients were considering buying it at that time as they didn't want to miss it at auction. From my experience I know that the top two reasons most selling agents try to get you to buy a property a few days before auction is they either don't have anyone else keen on it or the reserve they have been given is above what they think they can achieve at the auction. Knowing that I told my clients that I thought we’d be able to buy the property for less on auction day.

With spirited bidding from four different parties, some serious vendor conditioning at the auction as the reserve was lowered and lowered before the property was called on the market - the hammer finally fell in my clients favour at $2.316m. They were thrilled with the result as it was well under their maximum budget, well under what they would have paid if they hadn’t engaged EPS Property Search and within a few thousand dollars of what I had told them the property was worth.

So if you want a buyer’s agent who knows current property values and has persistence and patience then Click here and send me a list of your property requirements.