Helping your real estate agent get record prices for your apartment

SUMMARY: 

You can help your real estate agent getting a record price for your apartment by ensuring you give them all the information. Figuring out your goals and letting us into what they are can only help us reach them.

We need to know your time frames, and what urgency there may be to sell and what price you believe you may be able to get. We can then guide you into what would be realistic, for example if you need your property sold within two weeks the price will be very competitive over what we may price it as due to having a longer amount of time to sell.

Asking what you can do to improve your property is a great idea, a good agent should make these suggestions too. Sometimes getting the deck cleaned, having some staging furniture or painting a tired wall may make all the different to achieve a record price.

Lastly, ensuring the agent has the ease and flexibility with access to your property. This is going to help reaching a high price as more buyers will be able to view the property. You will be easy to have more parties’ interest in property if you allow the agents to market it well and pay for these fees, this definitely ensures you are on track to reaching a record price.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Andrew Murray, Apartment Specialists. How can you help your real estate agent get the best price for your Auckland apartment? This is actually a really good question and it is always about what we can do for you. But the thing is, there's quite a few things - three main things where you can help your real estate agent get the best price for you.

Number one is give us all the information. Now, I don't mean you have to give us all your personal information or what the situation is behind why you are selling the property. But we need to know what your goals are. You've got to remember that you are our boss and we've got to know how we can please you, i.e. What are the timeframes? If you'd like to have this property sold in four months, three months, two months, one month. Or it is urgent and needs to go in two weeks. Because without that information, we can't make the right decisions.

I understand because if you want it gone in two weeks, we would have to price it very, very competitively and very, very close to basically where it's worth. And your likelihood of getting a record price is very slim because of the timeframe. You would still be able to get the market value for it. But getting that premium is going to be a lot more difficult. For example, if you actually told us "Look, don't worry we just want you to get the highest price for our property. You can take as long as you want", that's ideal because then we know that and we can price it accordingly to get that value.

Number two, ask what you can do to improve the property. A very good agent should already ask you this and should be telling you this, and going, 'Look, what we need to do is this, this, and this to get this property looking fantastic.' Let's say that the agent doesn't do that. As an owner, ask the agent, "Is there anything that needs to be done that can improve it?" i.e. Maybe the deck needs to be cleaned or the windows need to be cleaned. Or, for example, it needs a new couch, put a new couch in. Because these things make such a difference.

Number three is make it as easy as possible for the agent to market your property because there's a saying in the real estate world which is "you can't sell a secret". If you don't make your property visible to as many people as possible, you are not going to have as many buyers. That also affects the result. So take on their recommendations. Often, an agent will give you three different options. The third option is really just making them look good, in my opinion. It is the second one down which is probably the best. Definitely, do not skip on marketing. Remember that the most important thing with selling an apartment is your online presence. The paper is now redundant and I very strongly, strongly believe this, because that's what I do every day.

Anyway, next week we are going to talk about how much commission is charged for selling an Auckland apartment. What are the different agencies charging? How much should you be charged for?