One of the aspects of any severe downturn in the residential property sector that he has come particularly to dislike, says Tony Clarke, Managing Director of the Rawson Property Group, is that it leads to greedy bargain hunters. “The sort of people who on principle reject a fair market price and are inclined to believe that every seller must be desperate”, being able to time and again make a real killing – often placing offers at 30% below a fair market value so long as the recession lasts.
Encouraged by their successes in a recessionary period – “this definitely happened in the 2009/2011 era” – such people even today, despite housing increasing in value year-on-year by 7 to 8%, still snoop around and continue to make ridiculously low offers, wasting the agents’ time in the process.
“These days, of course, they have absolutely no success,” says Clarke, “but many are still trying hard to operate in this way.”
Such bargain hunters in the long run, he adds, dig their own graves because good estate agents, realising that yet another unacceptable bid is about to be made, will avoid dealing with them and will not pass their offers to the client. They will even go so far as to delete their names from the list of regular contacts made through email or telephone and in the long run the bargain hunter will find himself losing out on good prospects.
What, therefore, does Clarke see as a reasonable, realistic way to go about making an offer on a property these days?
“In today’s market, with demand outstripping supply in all the urban areas and sometimes in the rural areas as well, if a bid is to have a genuine chance of being accepted, it should be within 10% of the asking price – and should contain no tricky conditional clauses. Buyers have to realise that recently, a fair percentage of homes marketed by any good estate agency are being sold at the full asking price. Bargains are therefore a thing of the past and the inveterate bargain hunters are now no longer welcome by estate agencies and the bargain hunter had better change his modus operandum if he wishes to continue to invest in property.”
For further information contact the Rawson Property Group on (021) 658 7100.
