Note No. 18
Why we print the guide price, and what “on application” usually hides
A house with no figure beside it collects enquiries and loses buyers. We tested it on three lots this season, and the arithmetic was not close.
Eighteen notes since the spring
Notes on selling, and on the coast.
Short pieces written by the partners between viewings: what a figure did, what a survey found, and what we would do differently. No market predictions we would not print in the report.
Notes 10 to 18
Page 1 of 3
Note No. 17
Eleven days early: how the private list changes the first offer
Four of this year’s eleven sales were agreed before a public entry existed. The first offer on those four came in higher, and it came in faster.
Note No. 16
Square feet that survive a survey, and the 9% that usually do not
We measure before we write. Across eleven houses the measured area came in 9% under the figure the previous agent had printed.
Note No. 15
Summerland is no longer the cheaper Montecito
At $1,120 a square foot it has closed most of the gap in three years, and the buyers arriving now are not the ones who used to come for the price.
Note No. 14
What a dawn photograph does that a drone cannot
Every house on this coast has been shot from the air. Almost none has been shot from the doorway at six in the morning, which is when the rooms are worth looking at.
Note No. 13
The week seven price cut, and how to avoid needing one
A reduction is read as an admission. Of the houses we saw cut this half year, the median took a further fifty-one days and still sold under the original guide.
Note No. 12
Three questions a surveyor always asks, and nobody prepares for
The roof, the wiring and the drainage, in that order. Finding the three dates before the survey is booked has saved two of our sales this year.
Note No. 11
Why the catalogue stops at twelve houses
Two partners, accompanied viewings and a written particular each. Thirteen would not be ambition; it would be the first house nobody had walked properly.
Note No. 10
An instruction we turned down, and what happened to the house
The guide was set eleven per cent above the evidence by another office. It sold fourteen months later, for less than our figure, to a buyer we had introduced.