Real Estate agents plain piss me off. Not the people as such, I am sure they are very pleasant people outside of working hours, it's the professional persona that annoys me. All talk about being customer focused, promising the moon, while the reality is that it's all about maximising their commission. When we sold our home in New Zealand, we ended up doing the business ourselves. We did engage the services of a real estate agent, but left open the opportunity to sell the property privately to anyone who had not first gone through the agency. We took that decision as a result of a lack of initial confidence in the agency. We were sure that they would do their job, just not sure that our interests were being put before their own. Of course that is business and I accept that. I took immediate exception to the standard agent line of "let's put it out that at the best price and see what the market says". That whole Market Forces spin is just bullshit. The market isn't deciding, the agents are pre-determining the price for the market. The markets aren't driving up prices, agents are. Great news if you are selling but as 99% of sellers are also buyers, it's rather suicidal.
I also hate the messing around with auctions, highest offers, all that crap. I know exactly how much money I have to spend, and the seller knows exactly how much money they will accept. Time to stop playing games and start thinking about the 2 parties who should be the focus of the subject. While our agent pissed around trying to play people off against each other, and "letting the market decide", we simply told other people how much money we wanted. Those other people could have played the agent's game of trying to screw us, but they would have simply been rejected. Our way, everyone knew where they stood from the beginning and it made a simple process even more simple.
Coming to Sweden, the system was the same, but different. Agents were still calling the shots, and still dicking everyone around. Everything was "Offers from xxx kr". Seemingly no one was prepared to go out on a limb and say "This is how much money we want for our house". Despite them knowing exactly how much they wanted. That would be a bit too commital. We played the game a couple of times, but soon tired of the stupidity at work. In New Zealand, an auction, or a tender property sale has a close date. Offers also have a close date. An offer from a perspective purchase is valid until xx o'clock on xx date. Again, so everyone knows where they stand. In Sweden it is not uncommon for an offer to go completely unanswered, indefinitely. We got so tired of being pissed around that we put a cash offer to the listing agent on the condition that we receive an answer by 5pm the following working day as we would be looking at öther properties after that time. Nothing like a bit of pressure to get the wheels moving. Not in this case. Not a Yes, not a No, not a nothing. At the time, we didn't actually have any other properties to look at. But they didn't need to know that. It was about us having some rights as a purchaser. People forget that the purchaser also has rights. As dumb luck would have it, the following day we spotted a private advertisement for another property, which was exactly what we were looking for and had a fixed selling price. The seller actually said that "the first person to come up with xxx kr, can have the property". I liked that, it treated both parties with respect. A 20 minute walk through the place the following day, and we were property owners. 4 months later, our former real estate agent contacted us to tell us that the vendors were now interested in discussing our offer on the old property. We took great pleasure in telling them that we were dead serious about the expiry date for our offer and that we considered our business to be terminated once that date had passed. The agent seemed to be rather confused by this approach. I haven't checked since but I saw a year later that the property was still on the market and still with the same "Offers over" sales pitch. You would think that someone might have learnt something.
In the time that has since passed, I have watched one real estate company in our area destroy the local property market with pure greed. Properties listed with this agency, and they are the main player in town, have tripled in price over the past 4 years. One might argue that it's "market forces" but that myth is shot down when one compares with the prices being listed by those few who are choosing to list their properties privately. They are tracking upwards at a relatively steady, and sustainable rate. The agency, on the other hand, is trying to artifically create a natural market force by increasing the minimum sale price of every property it lists, which is about 70% of all the properties for sale in the region. It is so obvious by the fact that the listed start price for all properties is directly proportional to the floor area of the dwelling. So it's not just one seller being unrealistic. It's the agent telling all vendors that from now on all properties are to be listed at a rate of xxxkr per square metre. Market forces my arse.
When we bought our apartment in 2009, we paid 2,800kr per square metre. We bought the apartment from the body corporate accountant. If anyone knew the true value of the apartment, it was him. In the following couple of years, apartments bought and sold throughout our region were going for about the same rate, increasing slightly with inflation. Then the local real estate agent got involved and it all changed for the worse. Our building is one of the more popular in town. Despite it being a body corporate, people are always ringing the chairman of the board asking if they can be placed into a queue for future purchasers. We don't have such a queue but you can see that it is popular. On the odd occasion that an apartment comes up for sale, they rarely sit for more than one week before a sale is approved and signed. 24 hours in our case. With the agent now deciding that no commission is too much, they have gotten their hooks into the latest listing in our building. From our 2009 purchase price of 2,800kr per square metre, the newly listed price equates to 8,800 kr per square metre. Even with 4 years of inflation, that's just not justifyable. They may have crossed the greed boundary on this occasion. For the first time since we moved in, an apartment has been sitting empty, unsold, for a month now. That's about 4 times longer than the next slowest selling apartment. With little sign of interest.
The agent meddling has a negative effect on everyone. Sellers get disheartened, buyers lose interest, and the rest of us in the house have an empty apartment to tarnish our reputation as a great place to live. The problem is that we, as the body corporate, can't dictate the selling price of an apartment. This apartment could sit for months or years and there isn't a thing we can do about it.
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