Do you know I remember my Mum (who is 87 years old) saying that she bought her first home (in the early 40s) when the chap who owned the house she and my Dad were renting, said to her one day, "would you like to buy it?".
They shook hands and that was that.
Ah...the good old days, eh?

g'day annie,

yep i agree reckon us home owners are going to have to return to the modern version of that hand shake and get the agents out of the picture there are heaps of freebie sites on line and i actually generate as many contacts as what the agents do.

len

Reading len's story, we've been lucky. Sold a house in Brisbane 8 years ago and h acted for us; the purchaser's lawyer was easy to communicate with. The agent was the same person who sold us the house 10 years before; she would have had us give it away just so she could make a quick sale. We did give it away on the prices of about 3 years ago :), moral is, never go back and see a sold sign on your former place!

This current place: h quite quickly was comfortable in interacting directly with the vendor e.g. they went halves on an independent valuation. I don't quite know how that worked with the agent, I think he was only acting for a colleague and fairly disinterested.

If, heaven forbid, we put the acreage on the market; I would be so wary of a gung ho agent, what with the quirks, and modifications where the council-approved plumbing wasn't a good job.

yes rose; we could have sold here 40 times over if we agreed to give it away, after all real estate get 5% of the first $17,000 and they only get 2.5% of the rest (that ='s app' $250 dollars for every $10k they have to work to get go figure) so they have little interest above the $17k hey? just think about the mentality of this here if they sold every property at $17k they would be making 5% total commission hey pretty good well lots better than having to work to settle for little more than 2.5% isn't it??

and the other side of the coin (there are many aspects to look at here) can anyone tell me exactly what they do to earn that commission??? they did used to put signs up and run ad's in the local paper and even with a pic. now some are asking money for the signs and all ask you the vendor to pay for any advertising other than the online real estate dote com(e) site (some even charge for that). and do all buyers use the net? we have never ever had any enquiry come to an agent via the net, we have generated our own enquiries via the net and for free.

yes again rose we or should i say i never go back to see how bad the very aspects they bought your place for has been looked after, and if we have to drive by that location i look the other way we have never seen a buyer look after the landscape aspects that caught their eye in the first place.

len

There are good agents and bad ones. The system down here is like an e-bay acution. The advert reads offers above $X. I'm used to a system where the vendor states their price, and the vendee (?) offers under that price and they compromise somewhere in between. Well the last 3 realestate purchases we have made, have worked on the old system - we have been happy, the sellers have been happy, the agents have been nice.
All the agents that work on the dutch auction system seem to be "ar53h0135" if you don't mind be saying so. Daughter has had similar experiences.
we nearly bought a house as a rental investment. I made an offer, the agent said they had a higher bid, I said tough. The agent pestered me for a week. Then he told me 2 weeks later that the previous offer had fallen through, so we were back in the running. I told him I had lost interest. He told me I knew nothing about buying investment properties. I swore at him and hung the phone up loudly in his ear. end of story.
How does the dutch auction system work? Well - you put in a bid. They tell you they have a higher bid, and pester you to raise your bid, but they don't tell you how much has been offered, or by whom. etc, etc. FGS they might not even have another person bidding, like in the case I described above. It sucks big time.
Another thing I have learnt about buying real estate ..... get a survey done before you buy. Make sure the land fits the description exactly. 3 times it hasn't for us. twice it has worked out in our favour, and not been disastrous. The last time we pulled out of the contract because of the survey. Lucky for the vendors, or we would now own not only the land they were selling, but 1/2 their house that they weren't selling. It had been built across the boundary of 2 blocks. The agent doesn't really tell you any of that. Our solicitor told us to check it. A conveyencing officer will do the conveyencing cheaper than a solicitor, but they might not tell you to check the boundaries, and it is the responsibility of the purchaser to do that.

g'day sparaxis,

no such thing as good and bad up here hey, they all in same boat bad for the vendor good for themselves, some just sweet talk you better, the ladies are real stand over merchants all agents reckon they are more wiser than buyers and sellers.

some agencies are trying to introduce the hi-lo price range like some sort of open auction but it aint taking on up here good one qld buyers/sellers reject manipulative practises. i haven't bought from one of THESE agents yet but when i do i will be offering below the low price and telling them in no uncertain terms don't try and bullsh us into paying more than what we want tom, might pop their hot air balloon hey lol.

what does "ar53ho135" mean????

yes we always get map of area and check that the dimensions meet the descriptions would use surveyor if it looked odd. in laid out suburbs generally things are kosha that way.

up here they try to beat the seller down in price as it is rfe they are in cahoots with someone and try to buy property as cheap as then 12 months later because they are in the box seat for selling sell it off and make a killing.

len

mail len

lens garden page

We have recently come across a system called fixed date sale ,everybody that is interested puts their offer in not knowing what other people have offered and the owner opens the envelope. Its like a deadly one bid blind auction. You can wind up paying WAY more that the other bids.
Real estate agents love it and of course it is wide open to abuse as the agent knows who has bid what.
We had a house for sale in the 1980s had it with agents for 6 months and only got one offer, so we sacked them I placed a detailed add in the Age for $30 and we had people flocking in, we sold it the first week for $15 thousand dollars more than the other offer and of course we did not have to pay commission .
I have long thought that if you know your market and have a good conveyance solicitor who needs realestate agents.

g'day youngquinn,

yeh that's called tendering up this way must be the pits way to sell never seen anyone actually successfully sell that way either.

tried private ads folk up this way to immature to deal privately they need weening off using agents, maybe some rubber room treatment or such hey lol. you'll note not many qld'ers coming in on this thread hey, maybe too laid back hey chuckle when they get bitten they'll get active maybe hey lol. local ad's only target local market most buyers in this case are going to come from other places mainly the big smoke so very hard to get effective advertising in those papers way too costly, and hit-n-miss.

len

gardenlen,

For what it's worth, when I was searching for a place to buy a couple of years back I used the internet sites for 90% of the search and printed information for 8%. The remaining 2% was made up of talking to the agent and being told about some place that had not been advertised yet. Of course, this usually meant "it's been on the market for a while so we've stopped advertising it per se" but that's another story. The point is that internet advertising is critical for anyone to sell their house to me.

g'day mooquack,

from the agent side of things there have been no enquiries from the net plenty of hits when you go and check but no enquiries, all enquiries have come from signs, walk ins and local advertising in about that order. from our side we have had probably about equal enquiries from the net and from signage lots of hits everywhere just shows there are lots more window shoppers online because for those it is convenient. for us when we look next we look at the net first get an idea what's there may even look at some of them? then it will be down to what we see advertised and by looking at office front pics etc.,. need to remember there are a very lot of people that are not online and those that are may look for real estate on line or may not.

and an update the qld vendor gets left in the lurch again the agents grabbed the deposit for them selves that's how it iss and has always been, the only loser when a contract fails the vendor.

len

We sold our last house through the agents online advert, so it was well worth it for us. I take a look through the on-line ads occasionally, and so often the stuff they have advertised has been sold round here, and the ad not removed.
We bought our business property through signage, and I often read the property guide which comes with the saturday paper every week. All 3 are funded by the vendor of course. If I was looking for a property I MIGHT go to an agent that I have any respect for (I can think of 2 out of the hundreds round here). They will generally hunt out properties from other agents and split the commissions.
Anything that is zoned business or commercial round here tends to sell before you see it advertised unless it is way over priced. The agents and even private people go door to door to check out what is available, and make offers for prospective buyers. A business or commercial property can change hands without anyone noticing, so too bad if you were chasing after it. You have to do your homework.

any advertising in papers or magazines up here is paid for by the vendors listed you will find the agents pay very little, the ads in the magazines are quiet expensive for a small ad. out of about $600 worth of advertising all coherced by the agents we have had one response on one occassion. they put the big speel on you and prattle about how much they sell from the variuos ad's just doesn't happen from where we stand, reckon they just want to fill up space to ensure they pay little or nothing for their name to be seen.

no more advertising for us through real estate. and agents now won't sell or show your property to a customer of theirs unless you are signed with them regardless of whether you are open listed or not, they would rather miss a sale up here.

len

len,

I suspect that when people walk into the agents and are considered "walk in" clients, they may have already looked at the website to help them eliminate a number of properties from their search. I am not sure how real estate agents up there determine where people come from but I know that there were a few occasions where I rang an agent to enquire about a property that was advertised in the weekend paper, signage at the house, in the estate agents' windows and on the internet. I was never asked where I found out about the property so I might have been tagged as a "walk in" or "phone in" at times when it was actually the internet that triggered my personal contact.

Also, despite my research being primarily online, I never made an enquiry about a property through the websites because any enquiry I had was usually "can I go and see it for myself now?" which was easier to answer in person.