House not selling? Look at it like a buyer

Recent stats show houses in Auckland are taking longer to sell than in the rest of the country, with properties sitting on the market for an average of 71 days in Tāmaki Makaurau in September compared to an average of 67 days nationwide. What’s your best advice to a vendor with a property that hasn’t sold?

Peter Thompson, Managing Director, Barfoot & Thompson: There are three broad factors that influence the sale of a property, and they are the marketing to attract potential buyers, the house’s appeal to those buyers and price. Get these factors right, and you improve your opportunities to sell.

If your house is not selling, get an external opinion (at a minimum the views of your agent) as to what you can do to tweak some or all those broad factors.

See your house through the eyes of the buyer, not as the proud owner of your home. Remember, what appeals to you may not be what appeals to buyers. Is the staging right? Should you renovate areas? Could garden maintenance be improved?

The situation you are trying to create is a house that buyers find appealing and offers, in their eyes, value for money.

While it’s true that property is taking longer to sell, nationally sales numbers (September v September) were down only 10.9%. Your aim is to be among the large majority of homes that do sell.

Daniel Coulson, Chief Operating Officer, Ray White New Zealand:

A property will generally attract the most amount of interest when it is first listed for sale. Among many factors, this is mainly due to active purchasers who are either regularly searching for new properties to hit the market, or they have saved searches on websites like TradeMe, which send them properties once they have been listed.

If you have been on the market for some time, you may have noticed your open home and enquiry numbers start to fall.

Many suggest the best way to reinvigorate a property is to re-launch the campaign, potentially with new photography, a new advertising strategy and perhaps a new method of sale.

In the month of September, Ray White data shows that properties we took to auction in Auckland had a median days to sell of just 27 - meaning those owners were able to list and sell their home when the most active buyers in the market were making enquiries.

Covid has changed the way many people work, allowing them to operate remotely and therefore move out of the larger cities to smaller towns. What pitfalls should people moving from the city to a smaller town be aware of? Daniel Coulson, Ray White New Zealand:

It is easy to see why the allure of moving to a town is appealing. We see people moving in both directions depending on their stage of life. Wherever you are planning to live, whether that is a move across town or across the country, our suggestion is the more research you do on an area the better armed you will be in preparing for that change. Visit the area at different times of the day, learn the nuances of the local property market and, if you are moving to a town you are less familiar with, renting a home for the first period may be the best strategy.

Peter Thompson, Barfoot & Thompson: Rather than pitfalls, relocating from one community to another – regardless of reason and whether you have the flexibility to work remotely – requires acceptance that you are potentially facing significant change. In addition to comparing an array of positives and negatives, what needs to be taken into consideration is that adapting to change for the family unit can take quite some time.

Possibly the biggest challenge comes if, after moving to a smaller community, for some reason the decision is made to move back to a bigger city.

As property prices in urban areas tend to increase faster than in smaller centres, trying to buy property of a similar standard when moving from a small community can be a step too far financially. To achieve it the family may have to settle for a more modest house in a less desirable location than where they previously lived.

For this reason, rather than sell immediately, some families opt to rent out their existing home and rent in the new locality for a while. Once they are committed to the new location, they then sell their city home.