Disclaimer: These comments are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect the current opinions and policies of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia.
I received an agent’s flyer in my letterbox on the weekend boasting about an “off market” sale. I’m sure the seller is pleased with the result the agent achieved for them and they didn’t need to endure countless home opens and potentially weeks of uncertainty.
However, they may also have that nagging feeling that they undersold. It’s impossible to know if they would have got a better result if they’d exposed their property to the entire market via a comprehensive, well considered marketing campaign.
It’s my view that the best way to achieve the highest price is to have the buyers competing to purchase. This is not about greed, it’s about agents discharging their fiduciary responsibility to their client.
My own decision to sell a property some years ago by going to market despite receiving a strong off-market offer revealed three additional buyers and an outcome 11 per cent above my initial expectation.
Very few buyers limit themselves to reliance on a single agent to find them a property and either “go it alone” or register their buying needs with several agents. These buyer data bases are an excellent source of would-be buyers for agents when pitching for business and are a genuine source of buyers when first bringing property to market. Enticing these buyers to act before the property “comes to market” can sometime deliver a great result because these buyers want to avoid competition.
Although, I think sellers ought to not overly rely on an agent’s ability to deliver fist fulls of active “known” buyers to secure a sale.
By far the largest of the buyer groups is the active “unknown” buyer; those that scan reiwa.com and search through newspapers to seek out property within their price range and in their preferred locality. Most agents target these buyers by simply advertising their properties in places they know these buyers are looking.
To uncover the best price, sellers really ought to tap into this buyer group as that is where most of the buyers are hiding. Folk that sell to active “known” buyers before they can be seen by the “unknown” types will never really know if they got the best possible result.
By Hayden Groves – REIWA President
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