Ask a buyer’s advocate: what private sellers get wrong

“The first one is presentation, right down to the photographs. I can tell when I’m looking at a sell-your-own-property portal and the photos have been done on a smartphone. They don’t look great. It’s always worth investing in photography. It’s not very expensive when you’re selling such a valuable asset.

“The other one is availability. Don’t make it too hard for people to see the property. Whether it’s sold through an agency or the owner is handling it, if they make it hard for you to get through, they’re already putting up a barrier.

“Then the negotiating. It can be really confronting for sellers. They’re close to their own asset, and it’s very hard to have an impartial conversation. If you’ve got a personality that can’t handle hearing anything negative about your home, or fielding lowball offers from a buyer who’s starting low, think about who in your circle could step in and handle the negotiating for you. Once you’re offended and fall out with a buyer, it’s very hard to pull a deal together.”

“Private sellers tend to be pretty organised with their paperwork, which is a plus. But if you’re making the effort to sell your own home, engage your conveyancer or solicitor early and make sure the documentation is thorough. Order all the certificates that go in that contract, so your buyers aren’t coming back to you asking for more.”

“Sure have. Sometimes they’re on portals, and other times they’ve emailed me or called our office. They can be really tough to deal with. They’ve got an idea in their mind, they’re emotional, and they can get nervous when the deal is coming together and behave differently to what you’d expect from someone who’s a trained professional.

“As an advocate, an owner selling their own property is probably one of the most tender and challenging people to negotiate with. You’ve got to balance being shrewd with being respectful, and not letting the deal go off the tracks.”

“You’ve got to be really mindful of the first impression you make, and of every bit of dialogue. Nothing can be misconstrued as offensive or personal about the home. With an agent, you can say it straight.

“Say I’ve had the building and pest inspection done and there’s a laundry list of things to fix. With an agent, I can be a bit brutal about that and use it to justify the reduction I’m applying to my offer. With a vendor, you’ve got to be careful, because it’s their home. They feel like they’ve looked after it, and suddenly you’re coming in with a list of everything wrong with it.

“So you dial back the strength you’d normally show an agent and leave room for a bit of humility. Where you stay strong is on process. They have to treat your offer exactly as they say they will, and come back to you when they say they will, because you’re relaying all of that to your clients. You can’t have them flipping and flopping.”

“Private sellers have a habit of gravitating to the best comparable sale and clutching onto it. An agent understands there are anomalies in every set of comparables. One might have fetched a really strong price because it was an outstanding auction and the wind blew the right way on the day. Another might have had two emotional buyers fighting it out, like the people next door, who’ll fight hard when they have a vested interest in that site. And some results are poor for reasons outside anyone’s control.

“Agents have walked through far more properties than vendors. They know the background to the sale, they saw the auction, they know who bid. They’ve got a much bigger library and a more realistic outlook than someone hinging everything on one sale.”

“They’re a good conduit. Communication between buyer and seller is always once removed, so they can filter the things the other party won’t want to hear, the things that taint a negotiation because emotions get in the way. If I walk through and the agent asks what I think, I might say it’s not for me, I don’t like this or that. They’ll soften it and explain it to the vendor constructively. If I gave that feedback to the vendor directly, I could crush them and destroy the relationship.

“They also talk frankly with their vendors about presentation. That can be a really tough conversation. I’ve worked as a listing agent, and I remember having to tell a dear vendor that her dog really smelled. But if you have the property looking and smelling nice, you’ll get a far better reception from buyers.

“The thing they do exceptionally well, and that vendors selling their own property often struggle with, is handling competing buyers. A good agent is clear about their process and leaves no doubt about how they’ll deal with your offer and any others. It might be best and final, where you get one go. It might be back and forth with some transparency. It might be fully transparent, on Zoom or in the office, where you can see the other buyers and know nobody’s bluffing.

“Vendors confuse themselves. They take a liking to one buyer, say one thing and do another, and then feel torn, because once someone wins they have all those rejections to hand out. It’s a very difficult scenario for the uninitiated.”

“The conversation. Someone can make a decision on the back of a conversation, and buyers can flip and flop very quickly. It can be a perception-based decision that’s not built on fact. Emotions get in the way. They might not like the agent.

“No amount of tech or data gets someone across the line when what’s needed is to pull it all back and talk about why we’re here in the first place, whether this property is the right fit, and whether they’re comfortable proceeding at that level. People tell me tech is replacing a lot of moving parts in my industry. I don’t think the role of an adviser can be replaced at all. People need that human touch. They need to talk things out, be emotional, and have someone help them navigate it who understands their position.”

“Presentation, pricing, and having the right representative to greet the buyers: someone skilled at documenting the level of interest being shown, so I have enough information as a seller to sell for a price I’m happy with and confident about. You never want the feeling that you’ve undersold your property because you missed one of those steps.”