Does your budget cover it?

• Published date: 14 April 2024
• Publication title: Herald on Sunday

Agents who are in the business of selling trophy homes for $10 million and more seem to be split on the issue of guide prices

In Australia, it’s unusual to find price indications on prestige listings, but in New Zealand, the rule is you don’t talk price with potential buyers until they’re committed.

Terry King, who sells in the wealthy Auckland suburb of Remuera, has long bucked conventional thinking on price, telling OneRoof that talking money upfront is the “only way to sell real estate”.

“Price has not been an issue because it’s already there. Even in the middle or lower price points, it’s the same. You know the price, you can walk in and buy it today,” he said.

King’s latest high-end listing is a mansion at 532 Remuera Rd, which he has priced at $32m. He already has two interested parties looking at the property, and is confident it will break price records.

King said there were three key reasons why his agency, Remuera Register, listed homes with fixed price.

“First, isolating the buyers who could afford the property. It’s unusual for someone who doesn’t have the money to ring up, but I would still ask ‘does your budget cover it?’,” he told OneRoof.

“Second, the price is the key reason agents and vendors fall out about because they’ve not agreed to it at the beginning.

“And third, the price is real because we’ve got a registered valuation. It’s a scientific way of doing it.

“Buyers at this level don’t want the publicity, they don’t want people to see them. When they find something they like, they want to buy it.”

Ray White Epsom agent Ross Hawkins agrees. “If it’s not an auction, then you need to have a price indication on it,” he said. “This is now becoming more common and is a breath of fresh air for the market to know just where they need to be.”

Hawkins said that he was more likely to get calls from interested buyers once they knew the price expectations.

“It’s more important than ever to give a guide on price in this market due to higher stock levels and lower buyer numbers,” he said, adding that for buyers who were shopping around and comparing value propositions, a competitive price guide gave a property the edge. “There are so many listings with no price indication, no one knows where they stand.” He added: “CVs are more irrelevant than ever. They are all over the place and are purely a desktop exercise. They don’t compare apples with apples and they don’t take recent renovations or views or any X-factor qualities into consideration.” Hawkins...