Welcome to Glover Real Estate

Issue 64 - Advertising phrases guaranteed to lower the sale price of your home - July 2010

It pays to be very careful when your home is being advertised for sale.  Any hint that you are under pressure to sell, will be taken as an open invitation to buyers to make unrealistic offers.

To us, anything about the sellers’ circumstances rather than about the property is a breach of our ethical duty to use our best endeavours to achieve the best price for the owners. Other agents also have that duty, but I don’t think that it is always taken as seriously as it should be. 

It is noticeable that many of the worst examples occur in advertisements that are vendor funded so that not only are the unfortunate owners’ circumstances being advertised to the buyers but the seller is having to pay for the advertising as well.

With typical vendor-paid advertising space being somewhat larger than company-paid advertising, there is a lot more space to fill and personal information that should never be disclosed is regularly being shouted from the rooftops. Do the agencies involved not realise that their sellers are being adversely affected by this, or it simply that they just don’t they care?

The following phrases all appeared in one issue of ‘Western Homes’ on 13 May 2010:

‘Vendor Bought – Must sell’
‘Vendor Desperate to Sell’
‘Negotiable’                       
‘Seriously for Sale’             ‘
‘Bank say must sell’                       
‘Urgent – Owner gone to Australia’ 
‘Beat the bank’                                 
‘Must be sold’      (x2)                      
‘Urgent sale’                                    
‘The vendors are packed…’        
‘Vendors off travelling’
‘Highly motivated vendor seeks..’    
‘Our owners have purchased and this home MUST be sold’        
‘Price reduced after fallen sale’      
‘Owners have bought’                    
‘Forced Sale’                                  
‘Vendor must sell’                          
‘..forces them to sell their home.   
‘…must be sold’                             
‘Vendors have already purchased’
‘It’s got to go – instructions from Oz’
‘southbound owner instructs to sell’
‘Must be sold’                                  
‘Forced sale – beat the bank’  
‘An immediate sale is required’    
‘sell without delay’                 
‘Circumstances require immediate sale’
 ‘Must go under the hammer’       
‘overseas owner wants it sold’   
‘reasons force owner to sell’     
‘owner moving overseas and must sell’
‘Urgent Sale’                           
‘Overseas owner needs this sale’
‘..owner moving overseas.’   

While the agents would probably say that they are trying to create urgency, I would say they are trying to make a sale at any price, with the loss the sellers’ to bear. Nobody needs this lack of professionalism.

Ways to avoid this happening are:

Don’t pay for advertising, certainly not for large advertisements.
Don’t tell salespeople your reason for selling – they may use the information against you.
Do tell the agency that you want to review all advertisements BEFORE they appear in the newspaper or on the internet.  

If there is anything, but anything, in the text other than information about the property, forbid the agency to run that advertisement.

If you care to look at our advertisements, you will note that we never use phrases of this type – but then, we  are trying to live up to the requirement that we do the best for our sellers, the ones who are paying us to do our best for them.