How to sell an Alderley home

James O’Dwyer shares how Alderley home owner earned an extra $100,000

Is the offer on the table for your property worth taking?

Should you bite the bullet and sign the sales agreement or should you seek advice as to what your next move should be?

At Best Use Real Estate, the team regularly meets vendors who a residential agent has convinced to sign on the dotted line for fear of missing out on a sale.

Not sure what to do, they agree to the offer thinking to themselves, “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.” Only to find out later they could have walked away with a much better deal.

James O'Dwyer - Director - Best Use Real Estate

Lucky for an Alderley owner, they were saved from the pain of accepting a low offer. James O’Dwyer informed them that their property was worth $100,000 more and that they were going to make a big mistake taking the low-ball offer the residential agent had presented.

They took James O’Dwyer’s advice and walked away with an extra $100,000..

“Everyone thinks selling property is easy. Many vendors believe that our job is no more challenging than taking photos of a property, running a few advertisements and waiting for the buyers to make an offer,” says James O’Dwyer, Best Use development site specialist.

“It is not until you point out that the deal their local residential agent has negotiated is losing them money that they stop and start to listen.

“In the case of the Alderley property, the owners had received our newsletter. Hoping they had not settled for too little, they contacted us for a comparison appraisal of their property.

“When we first met, they were happy with three offers of $900,000, but my experience had me thinking they were missing out. After some research, it was clear that the agents they were working with were pushing them to sell for $100,000 less than its’ value.

“When I told the owner they were six figures short of what the property was worth; they were shocked.”

Key point: Just because you have several offers on the table for around the same amount, doesn’t mean those offers are an accurate indication of the real price.

“What took us all by surprise is that the offers were not from three different buyers. The developer was behind each of the offers. With the help of two of his friends, they worked together to give the impression that the three offers were the true market value,” explained James.

“Let that sink in for a moment. A developer went to a great deal of trouble so that the vendor would settle for less.

“I know from experience that if we had not been working on the sale, the vendor most likely would have accepted the lower offers as the true value of his property.

“You would think that this type of behaviour is out of the ordinary. Well it isn’t, you enter the sale of your property without the right advice and you are entering the lions den ready for the slaughter.”