VZ REAL ESTATE

Anyone who has ever borrowed money to buy a car knows the initial excitement. You take delivery and you feel you could drive forever. It’s exhilarating, almost intoxicating. But in our drunken desire for possessions it is easy to forget the debt hangover that follows. Within a few months, the glamour of the purchase is replaced by the grind of the payments. Delight turns to depression. And so too with home-buying. In the excitement of getting what you want, it’s hard to see any danger ahead. This is especially true if – as is happening at the moment – the people who make money when you buy, the real estate agents, are urging you to buy, patting you on the back and saying “You’ll be right.” As any salesperson knows, it is easy to sell someone something they want. Everyone wants a nice home and every real estate agent wants to sell homes. And so, when the Reserve Bank issues a warning to homebuyers to be careful about overcommitting themselves, the real estate industry is quick...

The real estate industry has convinced itself and the marketplace that the more exposure a property gets during the sales process, the better the outcome. Paying for exposure through expensive advertising presents two dangers: the loss of any upfront monies paid and the real responsibility of an eventual lower selling price. The Real Estate Institute of Queensland website states: “It is no secret that the greater the exposure a property has to the market, the greater the number of buyers who are aware of the listing.” While this may seem logical, it’s worth digging a bit deeper. For example, is there a level of exposure that does more damage than good? When marketing a property for sale, does it need expensive exposure? Scattergun exposure to thousands of non-buyers can devastate the eventual selling price. Simply put, every person who sees a property but doesn’t buy it further erodes the eventual selling price. Maximising the sale price of a particular property n...

One of the big four banks has hinted that getting a home loan may become a little easier following the banking Royal Commission. ANZ’s head of Australian Economics David Plank says that, in terms of policy, most of the credit tightening measures are already in the system. “The Royal Commission report doesn’t point to any further need for banks to tighten,” Plank says. “But there is still some way to go to implement all the steps that they’ve got in place, so you’ll probably see through some further tightening, but the vast bulk of it’s through.” He says it’s unlikely there will be any additional shocks and for some buyers to expect increased competition among lenders. “I think we’ll see at the margin some relaxation perhaps in criteria as they think about what they’re going to do with investor only loans,” he says. “The regulator has made it clear that they don’t want to see any further tightening so it’s possible that greater certainty might lead to some easing up on som...

Bait pricing hurts both sellers and buyers, and despite recent legislation changes aimed at preventing the practice, it is still rampant.  Just as AFL coaches find ways to manipulate rule changes for their own benefit, real estate agents find ways around the new legislation to still engage in bait pricing to avoid confronting the truth with their clients. The Monash Business School defines bait pricing as: Advertising an item at an unrealistically low price as ‘bait’ to lure customers to a store or selling place. Peter O’Malley, in his popular new book,  Inside Real Estate , states that “when the market is strong, bait pricing by real estate agents is rampant.  For a buyer, seeing a property promoted for $1.2 million or more but sell for over $1.5 million can be confusing.  Is the market really that strong or are you being misled?  That’s the question many unsuccessful buyers ask themselves as they leave auctions defeated again and again.  Eith...

What is the Smart Sale? How can it benefit you? THE SMART SALE STRATEGY USES THE PRIVATE TREATY METHOD OF SALE, WITH SOME SUBTLE VARIATIONS AIMED AT OBTAINING THE HIGHEST PRICE. If true genius lies in the ability to take something complicated and make it simple, then the reverse must hold true. Most common real estate methods take a straightforward process and make it dangerous, complicated and risky, for both buyer and seller. The aim of any sale for the seller and their agent is to maximise the final sale price, with minimal risk for the seller and within the agreed time frame. The aim for the buyer? Find the right property at the right price without having to navigate the deception of false pricing and spending money for no result. For both the property seller and buyer, simplicity leads to good outcomes, and simplicity is the hallmark of The Smart Sale. Most properties sold in Australia would benefit from this most transparent strategy. During a private treaty sal...

When asked to price a property, a real estate agent has the opportunity to impress the owner and obtain a listing. Listings are the lifeblood of any real estate career. The two most common lies in the real estate industry involve the estimate price quoted to potential sellers. One is the lie real estate agents are most known and disliked for – the intentional over-inflation of a homeowner’s potential selling price. The second and subtler of the two lies is one of omission. Both have the capacity to hurt a property seller financially and emotionally. Why is an agent prone to using the two lies? For an untrained agent, one who lacks high-level marketing and negotiation skills, the only way to impress and subsequently obtain the listing is to promise the most inflated price they can get away with. Quite simply, they inflate or omit the truth to get business. As property owners, we want to believe. That’s why the two lies are so powerful. It allows people to pl...

By Lisa Hayden “You can’t sell a secret you know.” This is a line given by thousands of agents to thousands of home-sellers in order to persuade sellers to splash out more and more money advertising their homes. The theory goes like that the more places you advertise your home, the more buyers you reach. Of course, anyone who knows anything about basic marketing knows that such reasoning is nonsense because most buyers look in several places during their search for a home. The main purpose of real estate advertising (and all agents know this because it’s one of the first things they are taught in ‘agent kindergarten’) is to increase the profile of the real estate agent – and, in these days of the “celebrity salesperson” to increase the profile of the salesperson. Agents who tell sellers that advertising their homes at huge expense is necessary are either incompetent or dishonest. Most (probably about 90 percent) of the money spent by sellers advertising their homes is totally w...