21
Jun
Winning the property game
Price governs property sales. It is not the location. It is not
the size. It is not the condition. It is the price. Location, size
and condition influence price. But price governs everything.
Think of your own home. Estimate three prices. The first being a
very high amount …. a figure that your home would never fetch
in a month of Sundays. The second figure, a very low sum …. a
figure at which you would have would-be bargain hunters fighting to
buy the property on the first day of marketing and being prepared
to gazump to achieve their goal. The third figure is between the
other two. This is the amount your property might fetch if pursued
by a couple of ready, willing and able buyers after several weeks
of marketing on the internet and in the press. These buyers
wouldn’t have been alone in viewing, but the others will have
decided against proceeding further for whatever reason.
You can apply this rule to any property and all three figures
determine the speed at which the property will – or will not
– sell.
Human nature demands that every seller will want to try to
achieve the first figure with a strong reluctance to descend to the
second. However, the discerning seller will steer the third, middle
course. In a property sale one can determine the price one gets and
one can determine the time it takes to sell. But it is tricky to
determine both together – especially in this market. To
achieve a perfectly timed and priced sale the seller has to move
the price more towards the realistic than the optimistic, and in
some cases, sadly even nudge the pessimistic. Or they must be
lucky. The question every seller has to ask is, am I lucky? Or, do
I have time to be lucky?
The good news is that even in a depressed market, such as we
have now, there is a level of movement stimulated by those who must
sell and/or buy, usually through reasons of birth, death, health,
marriage, divorce, job change, retirement or money concerns. The
even better news is that moving home is a game of two parts;
selling and buying. Usually, what one loses on the swings, one
gains on the roundabouts. So in the end all things pretty much
level themselves out.
Remember that first estimated figure, the highly optimistic one?
That figure is all very well in a buoyant market, with buyers
scrambling to purchase what little there is available, where
lenders are throwing money at borrowers, where there is much less
unemployment than we have now and far more confidence, where there
are no austerity cuts, where the property market is on a charge
upwards and panic buying is rife. Can there be any reasonable
person in this country who feels we have these conditions right
now?
Price realistically to win the property game!