The real cost of your property search

Is it quality time with your family? When you’re tied up with work, school plays, swimming lessons, guitar practice and basketball training all week, your only option is to get out there with everyone else in Melbourne and fight the Saturday traffic to find your dream home. Dragging your kids along with you, Ipad in the back of the car just to avoid a tantrum as you cross the city to make it to the next inspection on time… Only to then invest yourselves emotionally in a property that goes $200k above your budget at auction the following week. Not quite what dreams are made of. We do the running around for our clients, pre-inspect any potential contenders and ensure they’re going to be within an achievable price range before you even get into your car.

FInancial costs 

Or maybe it’s a financial cost. Are you usually paid $25p/h, $50p/h, $500p/h at your job? Buyers spend an average of 9 months searching for a new home. During the hunt, the average buyer will look at more than 300 property listings and attend more than 11 open for inspections before they get even get serious enough to make an offer. Making an offer is one thing, bidding at auction is another and it can take people many hours of researching and recording results to get to a place where they feel they start to understand true market value and even then that’s only useful if your search is focused on one area!  

Relationship & family costs

Is it the extended couples therapy sessions you’ll need to pay for just to get you and your partner on the same page?! One of the most immediate problems we see with new clients who have been looking for a year or more is that they are literally looking for two different properties. Getting both of your ideas heard but also being in an environment where you are going to be guided by an overriding focus on your future and growth potential is one of the quickest ways to get you and your partner speaking the same property language. We spend the first couple of weeks with our clients critically assessing their search criteria and ensuring we are on the same very well defined page. Often these couples who have been floundering around the Melbourne market for 1 – 2 years, purchase within 30 days of being with us as what they desperately needed was a clear plan and guidance so when the right property comes along the only question left is the size of the new TV, and that’s a battle we do not get involved in!

Everyone has an opinion on property

Perhaps you are going the purchase alone and can’t seem to escape the never-ending and highly conflicting list of dos and don’ts from well-meaning friends and family. The reality is that most of these people have purchased, one, maybe two and in rare cases three properties in their lifetime. So though they may have ‘done well’ with their real estate decisions in the past, that does not mean they have the years of experience in negotiation and detailed data analysis it takes to make the right decision time and time again. Opinions are like… many other things, everyone has them! Don’t get caught up in the family BBQ school of real estate advice, it rarely works out well.

At the end of the day you need to ask yourself, what do you want to invest your time in; your family? Your business? Yourself? Remember, we don’t sit at home googling how to extract a tooth. We call the dentist and make an appointment.

So leave the property search to the experts and give us a call.

Until next time.

Sam Davenport