With the average time to sell a home at 66 days, buyers are in an unhurried mood and real estate agents need to work extra hard to entice an offer. Listings are plentiful too with close to 17,000 on offer metro wide, some 5,000 above necessary levels for a balanced market. Certainly, those sellers “waiting for their price” ought to consider withdrawing from sale.
Part of this effort is to first identify and categorise buyers into three distinct groups; the latent “would-be” buyer, the “known” active buyer and the “unknown” active buyer.
The latent would-be buyer is the most difficult buyer group to target as these buyers typically are not actively searching for property and are only galvanized into buying activity when enticed by an especially glossy advertisement or happen past a for sale sign on a property “they’ve always wanted”. Marketing to attract such buyers is usually expensive too and it can be difficult to measure its effectiveness.
The “known” active buyer appears on an agent’s buyer data base and agents work hard to service these buyers and secure their loyalty. Agents will often seek a “conjunctional” arrangement for properties listed for sale with other agencies, introduce their buyer and be paid a portion of the commission by the seller via the listing agent. In this market, conjunctionals are welcomed by everyone although in some ways are increasingly more difficult to achieve as buyers become more knowledgeable via the instant availability of market and property information from the internet. Buyers are therefore more inclined to deal with the listing agent rather than rely on a “conjuncting” agent, equipped with their own informed views on fair market value.
Therefore, sellers ought to not overly rely on an agent’s ability to deliver fist fulls of active “known” buyers to secure a sale. Very few buyers limit themselves to reliance on a single agent to find them a property and either “go it alone” or register their buying needs with several agents.
It follows then that by far the largest of the buyer groups is the active “unknown” buyer; those that scan http://www.reiwa.com and search through newspapers to seek out property within their price range and in their preferred locality. Most agents target these buyers by simply advertising their properties in places they know these buyers are looking.
To uncover the best price, sellers really ought to tap into this buyer group as that is where most of the buyers are hiding. Folk that sell to active “known” buyers before they can be seen by the “unknown” types are often left with the nagging feeling that they may have sold for more if they had exposed themselves to the largest of the buyer groups.
