We hope you had a great month and are looking forward to all the public holidays and long weekends that are coming up in April. 

In the news ……

You can’t have missed all the news on the Four Corners, exposing real estate agents. There were numerous articles and lots of discussion off the back of it. Watch the video below. 

Basically, the exposure was about “real estate agents and insiders’ secret tactics” used in the industry.  Whilst we do see many real estate agents adopting these tactics, at Harcourts Pinnacle we pride ourselves in caring about the people we work with regardless of if they are sellers, buyers, landlord or tenants. We always believe in doing the right thing regardless of the cost and we have built an amazing reputation that has continued to grow significantly over the past 15 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K62MxrUHDj4&feature=youtu.be

Below is further explanation of just a few of the “tricks” that the report covered to provide you with a better understanding.

Price Baiting:  Pricing a property lower than an owner will accept to attract more buyers and create a bidding war. 

Buying the listing: When an agent purposefully provides an appraisal price to a prospective seller well above the market value to get them to sell with the agent.  This is the biggest trick that we see potential sellers getting caught in, as they make their decision based on the price the agent tells them instead of based on the research that has been provided. It is important to always ask any agent appraising your house to show proof on how they came up with the price range for your property.  Check their selling track record as often new inexperienced agents secure a listing by “buying the listing”.

Underquoting: Telling a buyer they’ll get a property for well below the price it should most likely sell for.  In QLD we see a different style of under quoting as price guides can’t be provided at auctions, however some agents will tell a buyer with a strict $500,000 budget to attend an auction knowing the seller won’t sell for less than $700,000.

If you’d like to know more of the tactics (Dutch auctions, conditioning, etc), feel free to reach out and we can explain many of them in detail and how to look out for them.

What’s happening in the market?

Over the past two months the sudden increase of buyer activity feels like we are in the middle of a “mini boom” again, we went from the second half of last year where we were lucky to get 5 groups at the first open home that resulted in little to no offers and average days on market pushing out to 4-6 weeks. Whereas currently we’re now seeing 10-20 groups at each open homes resulting at multiple offers and selling most homes within the first 7-10 days at prices that are higher than the previous 3 months. This tells us that the market has basically bottomed out and buyers’ confidence is back and they are feeling more comfortable with navigating the market.

The image on below shows our buyer activity statistics from a 7-day period in March, that we wanted to share with you. During this period, we had 5 active listings in their first week on the market. We received 53 offers from 43 registered buyers in the 7-day period. The app that we use to receive and track offers is a 3rd party application called, Propps, www.propps.com. 

At the same time we also wanted to share with you our latest Harcourts Auction clearance rate for week covering 19 March to 26 March 2023. The clearance rate of 76% for Brisbane is an incredible percentage which is just as high as it was during the boom in 2021 and the first half of 2022. This supports our figures above regardless if we are selling property via the traditional way or auction. The market is strong and this could be a great time the go on the market if you are considering selling. 

With the possibility of a few more rate rises coming and many fixed terms loan unlocking soon, the question everyone is asking is this just the eye of the storm or are prices starting to rise again and in the recovery phase? 

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