This week’s again been slow however there are definitely buyers out there. The problem I am seeing is that because there’s such a limited number of buyers compared to the properties on offer, the homes that are stand outs because of price, location or presentation are being nearly the only ones to sell. This is making the normal, and the slightly below average type of property remain on the market for longer as it’s being overlooked for the better quality properties which really makes sense from the buyers perspective. So how do you sell in today’s market? Your home needs to stand out from the crowd and impress any buyer so that they put it on the top of the list and unfortunately sometimes this can only be done by price which today is terribly important. A report in The Age on 7/7/14 stated that more apartments are being built in Melbourne today than at any time in the city’s history with the conclusion that if you buy something off the plan today, in three years time, if you go to resell it, the apartment will be valued at less than you paid for it. Another 48 developments are still seeking planning approval, which would add another 23,241 homes. Half of these dwellings will be in the CBD the report added. Over the past year or so we have found that there is now a greater call for inspections later in the day from 4 pm onwards. Working from home it’s very easy to accommodate these requests but I just wonder how agents who have been in the office all day feel about working until perhaps 7 pm or later. Several months ago I reported a story where a person’s house was sold whilst he was away overseas on holidays for a number of months by some-one assuming his identity. Well this type of fraud is on the rise again, especially in WA for some reason, however we have personal experience with it here after receiving an email from some-one saying that they wanted to buy a certain home but that we had to sell their home first. All of the details related to some-one overseas and sounded suspicious so we deleted the email. This scam was re-enforced by an article by the president of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, David Airey who said that they were providing their staff with training to identify scams and ID fraud which occurred as a result of three people from Nigeria and South Africa being arrested on July 2nd. Such training now includes 100 point checks for all vendors. I won’t go into how they actually committed the fraud which was really simple to do and done via a real estate management agency, however it’s worth mentioning that the victim in the incident mentioned a couple of months ago actually lost his house and all of the money a buyer paid for his home. A report out this week detailed how couples were marrying later in life which meant that generally they were renting for longer periods which had the effect of boosting up tenancy rates for investors. I saw a sale result come through recently of a house which sold for $162,000. This was interesting because we had the property listed before the present agent where the vendor was offered $178,000 which he refused as he wanted no less than $180,000. Again this just shows that sometimes the best offer you receive is the first one and I wonder if the vendor tells people that he knocked back an offer from us which he now regrets or more likely that we couldn’t sell his home and the second agent was successful. The worst one I have experienced is a sale knocked back for $355K (the owner wanted $365K) and they sold around a year later for $305 with another agent. Sometimes we just wonder about it all. I mentioned before that realestate.au have increased prices, well lucky we are not in the Toorak area where it now cost $8,050 to advertise a single property on their web site. No wonder agents are looking at starting their own property site. I learnt something this week which even a local solicitor didn’t know which resulted in him giving the wrong advice to a potential purchaser concerning Strata Plans and nearly resulted in the loss of a sale. It seems that many years ago when subdivisions were first thought of there was a law that every subdivision had to contain a section of common property in case a future high rise building was proposed on a site. This resulted in basically everything at ground level being able to be subdivided into specific sections for each different owner however in order to have a section of common property they decided that everything higher than 8 metres above the surface or lower than 1 meter below the surface would be classed as common. So what we have in fact here is three different layers, the first one is above 8 mtrs high, the second between 8 mtrs above the ground surface down to 1 metre below the surface and the third from 1 metre below the surface down. This was called a strata plan. Thankfully subdivisions are a bit easier today however these older subdivisions do come up from time to time. This week’s useless information is:- A law in Florida says that if an elephant is left tied to a parking metre a fee has to be paid. The average person has at least seven dreams a night. Hot water is heavier than cold water I am always available to answer any of your real estate questions on 5831 6405. Please feel free to pass this email on to any person who you think may be interested in its contents. NOTE: The advice given in this newsletter is to be taken as general advice only and should not be relied upon. Regards Ken McNamara. Footnotes: If you would like to receive this email automatically every Saturday afternoon please email our office with the subject line of ‘subscribe to newsletter’ Ken is the number 1 selling residential agent in the Shepparton area, was the winner of the 2011 Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Award and was a finalist in the 2012 awards.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 23:04:00 +0000
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