Around 30% of all real estate transactions in Australia are done off market. John Carew, Director Mayfield Properties shares his insights and how off market properties open up more opportunities to buyers.
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Here’s the transcript of the video:
As a buyers agent you also get access to a lot of off-market properties. What are they, tell me about them? And how do you guys get access to them? Yeah. Well look, we just bought one on Friday actually off-market in Ashfield. So essentially, off-market properties are properties that are not yet essentially publicly listed, in REA, Domain or any other portal. You know Soho and the like so, they're properties that there's two ways they can come into the world. 1. They're genuinely an off-market seller. They're very private. They might be getting divorced. You know, they might need to do something quite quickly and therefore they don't have time to do a full campaign and styling and photographing and all that sort of thing. So that's one example, and then I guess in between that and being on the market we've got another category that we sort of called pre-market where they're going to launch on the market, but we get access to it before it's gone live, you know, maybe when it's being photographed. You know sometime around then and we can get through, have a look at it and if it works for our clients potentially do a deal with them. So they're a really good way of opening up other opportunities to buyers that they otherwise wouldn't be aware of. What buyers need to be careful of with off-market properties is that they're still doing the same level of due diligence and rigor around the pricing expectations what it's worth and not cutting any Corners just because it's off-market. Yeah, you know in some instances buyers are actually better even if they're aware of an off-market property to let it come onto the market and purchase it at a later date because the vendor's pricing expectations might be 10 to 15% above market. Gotcha. You know, so for the sake of you know, 4 weeks or 6 weeks you're better to wait that time. Generally with you're off-market properties are there discounts there like guys are trying to sell it a little quicker or you tend to pay premium or it's a bit of a mixed bag. It's a mixed bag. And this is again where buyers need to be careful, you know, because you don't want to be paying a massive premium on something just because it's off-market. Definitely if you've got a vendor say that maybe has just purchased something and they really need to sell quickly they're motivated. They're not testing the market. But just with the way that the market has been over the past 12 or 18 months a little bit more fickle obviously in the balance between buyers and sellers is definitely shifted upon what it was in 2017 and before, you know more vendors I'm seeing now are willing to engage at sort of what I'd consider a fair value off-market to do it cleanly, quickly with minimal fuss than they probably were in the boom times because things were going so strong that they were confident that they'd have 10 people at the auction, get 10 or 15 percent more than they were hoping. So yeah, the dynamics with that has changed but look, it's a really good way that buyers agents can add value to their clients. Yeah. And you know, just open up other doors that literally wouldn't have been open to them before. Yeah.
