Property Point

Over the Christmas/New Year period my wife and I were in Airlie Beach for three or four nights and one afternoon I found myself standing at the bar waiting to order a couple of drinks at the delightfully refurbished Airlie Beach Hotel.

The bloke standing next to me was ordering several drinks and one of them was “a glass of wine”. I felt it wasn’t the first round he’d ordered that afternoon and the barman, just making sure that the wine order hadn’t changed, checked by asking: “Was that a Pinot Grigio?”

The bloke answered, “Yeah, something like that.”

Now, I’m no Sherlock Holmes but I was pretty confident that one of the beers he had ordered was for him and the wine was not. What didn’t compute for me was the line “yeah, something like that” when he was asked to specify whether the wine he was ordering was a Pinot Grigio.

If the wine was for his wife then he and I clearly occupy completely different universes. In my universe there’s none of this “something like that” stuff when it comes to ordering anything for my wife.

Anyway, I couldn’t resist. “Is the ‘something like that’ drink for your wife?” I asked.

He said: “Yeah, she gets exactly what she wants for the first drink and after that I usually just get her a house wine and she never knows.” His wife was lucky this time. The barman remembered that she was drinking the more expensive Pinot Grigio.

I find that in life, in business and in selling real estate, the attitude of “something like that” doesn’t cut it.

When you are selling a property for someone you need to be really clear on what you are promising to do and then deliver on it.

If you specify to a seller that you are going to highlight certain key features of their property in the advertising and marketing in order to attract a particular type of buyer, then you had better do exactly that. No something like that, specifically that.

For me there is a strategy around creating competition for a seller’s property involving the words and images that are used, the timing and length of open homes and private inspections and the crucially important addition that we have at Gardian of ensuring our entire team of agents inspect your property and each one then contacts their list of buyers who are potentially interested. That’s how we create competition for your home and get the best price.

That’s what is promised so that’s what has to be delivered.

Not something like that.

That.

It is the same with buyers. Give them the information they need, do what you say you are going to do. Not something like that.

Sometimes an agent can have incorrect information. The seller might have told the agent something about a property that turns out to be mistaken, incorrect.

Mistakes happen, information can be communicated unclearly or incorrectly. An agent can misunderstand what a seller has told them.

The important thing is that any mistakes, any accidentally incorrect pieces of information are corrected as soon as the agent becomes aware of it and before a contract is signed.

It’s a difficult but vitally important thing to do; ringing a buyer and telling them as soon as you realise they have been given incorrect information.

You ring them and apologise and say I’m sorry that yesterday I indicated something to you I now know is not incorrect. You do it straight away, as soon as you know. And you make sure they have all the correct information before a contract is signed.

Because after the contract is signed no one wants to hear the agent say they had said “something like that”.

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