Property Point

“My grandfather smoked all his life and lived till he was 93.”
“My uncle bought a second-hand Commodore, drove it around for four years without getting it serviced, and it never broke down.”
“My mate hasn’t insured his house for the last 20 years and nothing’s gone wrong.”
All these statements could be true and there are others that fit into the theme.
And the theme is? Examples of behaviour and decisions that go against conventional wisdom but end up with a good result.
Another example I have heard offered is: “My neighbour put a For Sale sign up outside his house and got four offers in two days. He sold it in a few weeks.”
Now there is no difficulty in putting a for sale sign on something and people buying it.
People sell fruit on the side of the road all the time … “Mangoes $10 a bucket”. And their sales strategy is successful. Lots of people pull up and buy the mangoes.
They buy them because we have good mangoes in this part of the world and, here’s my point, because they are cheap.
Now, just like selling fruit, there is no problem putting a For Sale sign up outside your house and selling it.
In fact, my tip to the buyers out there is to go and knock on the door of a seller who’s doing that because you have a good chance of picking up an absolute bargain.
You will get to buy a property without all that pesky competition forcing the damn price up.
It will just be you and a few other people who have driven past, live in the neighbourhood or heard through word of mouth.
You won’t have to worry about all the people who live outside the area and could have seen the property professionally marketed on real estate sites. They won’t even know it’s for sale.
Most investors who can see great rental returns here and who are on the lookout for something to buy won’t even see it. And you can forget about the southern investors with plenty of money from places like Sydney and Melbourne … they are completely frozen out of this one.
So yes, you can definitely put up a For Sale sign and sell your house. Anybody can sell a house or a bucket of mangoes.
But the property market is a bit different to the road-side mango market. It is more dynamic, the numbers are bigger and there is a lot of competition in the Mackay market.
Competition forces up prices. Real estate agents like me will tell you there have been recent occasions when we have got 40, 60, 80 thousand dollars more than we thought we would get for a property because competition pushed prices up beyond what statistics and recent sales told us to expect.
The competition is created by the professional marketing, a network of agents who work together at a place like Gardian, our data bases of local and interstate buyers and our ability to reach people who will not see a For Sale sign outside a house in your street.
In this column I won’t even go into the ability of good agents to negotiate the best price they can get for a property.
This is not about ripping people off … it is about making sure a seller gets the best possible price for their biggest asset.
It takes market knowledge and an ability to create, foster and leverage competition to ensure the best price is achieved in a rising market.
There is a good real estate saying and I will not take credit for it but it goes something like: You don’t want to sell your house to someone who is buying in isolation, you want to sell it to someone who’s buying in competition.

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