Gold Coast Real Estate with Michael Conrick

It goes without saying that your home should be sparkly clean when selling, but it’s amazing how many homes are poorly presented on open day. A clean house is a well cared for house. If a buyer sees that you don’t take pride in the appearance of the home, they’re likely to wonder if you care about the maintenance of the home and will seek out faults.

Here’s a few quick points that should be attended to before every open inspection:

• Make sure the front garden is neat and presentable with freshly mowed lawns. First impressions count and it’s amazing how many people stop at an open and then drive off without coming in because the frontage isn’t appealing.
• Carpets, rugs and lounges should be cleaned before going on the market and regularly vacuumed.
• Hard floors should be swept and mopped.
• Odurs should be eliminated. Nothing turns off buyers quicker than smells like stale cigarette smoke, dirty kitty litter, inside dogs and blocked drains.
• Thoroughly clean your kitchen and bathroom. Tiles and mirrors should shine, and grout should be free of mould. Hang up some nice quality towels that compliment the colour scheme.
• Dust the furniture and window sills, and remove any pesky cobwebs. Also give the skirting boards a wipe.
• Declutter! Things you live with everyday might go unnoticed to you, but will be quickly noticed by potential buyers. Put away knick knacks and throw out old newspapers.
• Make sure there are no dirty dishes in the sink, clear off the kitchen benches to highlight space, and remove magnets from the refrigerator.
• Ensure there is nothing left hanging on the clothes line.
• If you’re time poor, consider getting a professional cleaner in every few weeks. It will be a great investment.

And make sure to keep the presentation standard up for the duration of the marketing. Most people get enthusiastic about presentation for the first few weeks, but if the home hasn’t sold quickly, the presentation standard soon starts to slip. Week by week, it gets harder to motivate yourself to spend a Saturday morning cleaning up, but hang in there as it will all be worth it when the perfect buyer is found.

The term ‘discounting’ is being thrown around quite a bit in the media lately. With the overall market being pretty soft and gently sliding downwards, there are plenty of news stories about vendors having to ‘discount’ their homes to get a sale.

If you jump onto Domain.com.au, and click the ‘Reports’ menu item, you can view a list of statistics for any suburb in Australia. For example, Hope Island properties on the northern end of the Gold Coast:

This shows an average current discounting level of 15.9% compared to 10.9% for the Gold Coast Council area.

The ‘Discounting’ figure is based on the difference between the advertised price when a property is first listed for sale compared to what it actually sells for.

The basic interpretation of this figure which commonly crops up in the media is that if vendors have to discount their home by 15.9%, then that must mean that the average value of a property in the area has dropped by 15.9%. This, of course, is complete rubbish.

Consider this analogy: if a car yard has a Commodore on the lot with a Redbook value of $10,000 and they set the price at $12,000, then proceed to advertise it in the paper as the special of the week for $10,000, are you really getting a $2,000 discount if you buy it for $10,000?

Most vendors want more than their property is worth, this is just human nature. And likewise, buyers want to pay less than a property is worth. Whilst real estate has no ‘recommended retail price’, it is relatively easy to determine what is ‘good value’ for a property based on recent sales of similar local properties. Whether or not a vendor chooses to advertise their property at a good value price, or choose a higher price to test the market and leave some room to negotiate is up to them.

In the case of Hope Island real estate shown above, where the average time on market is 267 day, chances are that some of the discounting is due to a fall in the market in that 9 month period, but most of that will be due to vendors overpricing their property in the early stage of the marketing campaign.

And when your home has been on the market that long, all you are going to attract is bargain hunters, so it will probably be necessary to accept a price less than market value in order to move on.

It is also interesting to note that there is generally a direct relationship between the ‘Days on market’ and the ‘Discounting’ number. Suburbs with a shorter average sale time will have less discounting. This can pretty much be attributed to more sellers pricing their property realistically from day one to get a good price in a short time, rather than being stuck on the market going stale.

So don’t let discounting figures scare you. Just make sure that you’re not a statistic by pricing your property well, marketing it well, and engaging the services of a great agent that will work their butt off for you, so that your time on market and discounting figure is way below average, and your sale price is above average.