Property Point

Fans of the New York-based comedy Seinfeld will be familiar with the character George Costanza, a superficial, conniving, selfish, lazy man with no skills or talents who spends most of his time trying to avoid serious work.

Some readers, the more spiteful ones, will feel Costanza has a personality that could be well-suited to a career in real estate. Nasty.

Anyway, George likes to impress strangers when he meets them and, because he is so resoundingly unimpressive, he creates a persona that he feels will elevate him in the mind of the person to whom he is being introduced.
He does that by fabricating a career. He pretended to be a marine biologist once, a lie that, while not entirely his own fault, did lead to a hilarious scene involving a whale with a golf ball stuck in its blowhole.
But more often than not George likes to pretend he’s an architect.

In one scene, he is introduced to a woman who says: “What do you do?”

George: “I’m an architect.”
Woman: “Have you designed any buildings in New York?”
George: “Have you seen the new addition to the Guggenheim?”
Woman: “You did that?”
George: “Yep, yep. And it didn’t take very long either.”

So George wasn’t satisfied with just pretending he was an architect. Nor just a high-profile architect who has created significant structures. No, he had to point out that it came easy to him. He was a quick worker.
You could imagine a similar conversation with a Mackay real estate agent at the moment.

“Have you sold many properties in Mackay?”

“Do you know 495 Bridge Road?” “You sold that?”
“Yep, yep. And it didn’t take very long either.”

And the truth is that properties in Mackay are not taking long to sell, although I wouldn’t recommend the Costanza response to any agent wanting to keep their friends.

However, it doesn’t mean an agent simply opens the door and the job’s done. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve sold real estate in a down-turn and, by comparison, this is Christmas on a stick.

A real estate agent’s job is to get the best possible price for their client, the seller. And, generally speaking, the best price for a property in Mackay at the moment will come early.

Sellers need to understand that it doesn’t matter how long they have been on the market. The question is, how long has the buyer been looking? How many properties have they missed out on?

Frustrated buyers will usually come in with strong offers as soon as a suitable property comes up. And if they can’t do a deal with you, they will move on to the next one.

It is in the seller’s interest to fully explore those early offers because these are the offers from the “hot buyers”, not the casual buyers who are having a sticky beak “and if we see something we like we might put in an offer”. Those people turn up with their offers two or three months later, when they see your property hasn’t sold, and throw in an offer “just to see what happens”.

If you are selling you need to have your property ready when you list. You need a powerful marketing campaign that immediately exposes the property to all potential buyers, you need big numbers in those first and second open homes and you need to be ready for early offers. Competition creates the best price and the longer you are on the market, the more the competition dwindles.

Later, when your friends ask: “Did you sell?”, you can say: “Yep, yep. And it didn’t take very long either.”

With the right agent and strategy, that will mean you got the best price the market would pay. And that you might have a bit of George Costanza in you.

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