A real life experience

Friday, March 6th 2009, 5:33PM

Often my Blogs have taken a more positive view of the housing market than other commentators. This week I’ll share with you a more personal view.

We put our house on the market recently and it is pleasing to say that it sold reasonably quickly at a price which wasn’t anything like the discounted numbers often talked about.

This is interesting as the local market had had one of its worst months ever.

For the first couple of weeks of the campaign a tender was run. While there were a good number of people through the open homes, the results of the tender were poor.

The strategy employed being that we may find someone who falls in love with the house and we “fluke” a great price.

Holding out for a fluke price is a little like gambling, or buying a lotto ticket and hoping to hit the jackpot. Secondly, I suspect it was also done as it is difficult to put a number on the house in this market. Really what I am saying is people are too scared to put a price on.

My advice to anyone is don’t bother with tenders. Buyers don’t like them – and that seemed to be the recurring theme coming through from people who looked at the property.

What was fascinating is that the first open home post the tender period was the best by far. People had a price and had something to work to.

Subsequently there was good interest shown from buyers.

I won’t go through the selling process except to say that the final price was pretty close to what we expected to get (within 1.5% of the lowest). How to price the property was not easy, and the figure we worked to was somewhere between the RV and what QV Insider suggested.

A view I have expressed before is that there is plenty of action in the investment property sector of the market.

Our house though fitted into the category of a good family home in the higher price band. My take is that people who feel secure in their job and have some equity are looking around to trade up in this market. Essentially for the same reasons investors are active. Prices are ok and finance is cheap.

Also getting finance doesn’t seem that hard for these people, even though bank lending criteria has tightened.

So my one example helps give me faith that the housing market isn’t as sad as others make out.

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