Should apartment owners sell similar apartments all at once?

Summary:

Often apartments owners who own many of the same or similar sort of apartments wonder if they should be selling them all at the same time or not.

It comes down to supply and demand and what is happening in the market.

We recommend if you are not under time pressure or have urgency to sell then do not sell them all at once. If you have too many for sale at one time you dilute the market and won’t get the highest price possible.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Andrew Murray from The Apartment Specialists. Good day. Today, I'm talking about a question we've been asked reasonably often and it's when - there's lots of owners, apartment owners, in the Auckland area who have more than one apartment. Often, a lot of them have more than one apartment that are very, very similar; they're often in the same building. They'll come to me and they'll want to sell two, three or four apartments, sometimes five. They'll ask me, "Can I put these all on the market?" and they'll ask me, "Should I put them on one by one or should I put them all at once?"

Now, real estate is all about supply and demand. Everything's about supply and demand. If there's more demand and less supply, prices go up. If there's a lot of supply, prices go down. I see it again and again in the industry where you'll have two of the same properties auctioned one after each other, sometimes three, or listings will come up on the Internet where an owner puts an ads for two of them.

First of all, that just dilutes the buyers. It reduces the chance of you having more offers because the other buyer knows there's another one. So absolutely not, unless there is a time frame involved. Obviously that changes things. But never, ever put them all on at the same time, unless they're completely different. If you've got three studios in one building or three one-beds or three two-beds or two of them, put them up one at a time and let the first one set the benchmark. It'll also bring in more buyers. Then use the same marketing. You can get really creative and make it really work for you.

So the answer basically is if you have more than one similar apartment or more than one apartment in the same building that is very similar, never, ever put them all on the market at the same time, unless there's a situation (i.e. it's an urgent sale).

Hope that helps. Cheers. Bye.