Scott Aggett on Where Buyers Lose the Negotiation

In this episode, we speak with Scott Agate, founder of negotiation service, Hello House. Scott's deep understanding of sales, buyer psychology and market dynamics makes him uniquely placed to talk about one of the most misunderstood parts of a property transaction, the negotiation.

We unpack what buyers are getting wrong when they go head to head with agents, why the property negotiation landscape is shifting and how a new model negotiation as a service might reshape the way we buy property in Australia. Welcome to the elephant in the room.

This is the podcast where we love to talk about the big things in property that never usually get talked about. I'm Veronica Morgan, real estate agent, buyer's agent and buyer's agent mentor, co-host of Foxtel's Location, Location, Location Australia, author of Auction Ready and co-host of Your First Home Buyer Guide.

Hi, I'm Chris Bates, mortgage broker, currently ranked number three in the MPA Top 100 Mortgage Broker Awards. Before we get started, everything we talk about today is not personal advice, and we recommend you engage the services of a licensed and experienced professional.

Our guest today is Scott Agate, who's spent over 30 years in the property industry and negotiated more than 4,000 deals across Australia, the UK and Asia.

From launching Bell Properties first offices in Sydney's east to navigating high pressure transactions at Foxen's in London, Scott has seen how the real estate system is engineered to serve sellers often at the buyer's expense.

And today we'll be talking about what it takes to shift the power dynamic in a negotiation, why traditional buyers agents might not be the best fit for every buyer and how Scott's negotiation first model is changing the way Australians buy property.

We're also going to look at the growing appetite for smarter, leaner buying strategies and what the rise of buyer advocacy services says about where the market is heading. We are looking forward to this meaty chat. Welcome, Scott. Good to see you again.

Thank you, guys. Yeah, I haven't seen you for ages, Veronica. Hello. Hi, Chris.

Hey, Scott. And Veronica kind of said new. I think it's not really new, right? You've been doing this sort of this service like negotiation service for a number of years. And if you seem to sort of what made you launch that service? Because it was new, though, at the time, right?

I mean, you had the traditional buyers agents and it was either full service or, you know, maybe some online $2,000 service or some weird service. But, you know, what made you launch it? And what's some of your learnings about launching this service? Why it got such good cut through over the years?

Yeah, okay, so I launched it about eight years ago after doing 23 years as an estate agent, as Veronica just said in the introduction. And really, it was off the back of my frustration with doing the job as a sales agent.

So you'd see the buyers week in, week out, you'd service them for a matter of many months, you'd have great rapport with them, but they just couldn't transact. So they lacked strategy, they lacked confidence, they lacked analysis skills, and they certainly didn't have a clue on the whole how to negotiate.

So the one thing that I really loved was negotiation and I felt I was good at it and obviously any agent that's doing any form of volume gets a lot of practice at it so they get to home that craft.

And I had a real interest in understanding the nuances of why people were making mistakes, where I won in the negotiation, where I might have said something wrong and that led to a different outcome. So I was paying attention to that while I was going through that process.

My frustrations with being an estate agent was in my market where I was in the eastern suburbs in Sydney, you had to lie to win. And I've had this argument with many of my competitors over the years who swear by and they don't lie and that's not how you win.

But we would go into listing presentations and unless you quoted high and then that required you quoting then low to buyers at the other end, it really was a game that you couldn't win if you wanted to lay straight in bed and do the right thing. So I struggled with that.

Just with my own personality, probably did it for many years too long because it was a good moneymaker for the family and for me. And there's a bit of an ego scratch when you do that and you're making lots of money as a young guy or girl.

But I really wasn't fulfilled in that role. And I went looking for, well, what if I could build a negotiation-only service because that's what I love. And then I saw the rise of the buyers' agents in Sydney.

So I watched the same buyers that would be with me for months and months then sort of come to the table in a negotiation and bring a weapon. They'd bring a buyers' agent, right?

And typically, not all of it, because there were some really great buyers' agents back then that are still around and really active today. And they've been doing the right thing by their clients for two decades now or more.

but there was a lot of buyers agents at that point that i dealt with that were only interested in getting to the finish line as quickly as possible yeah and the best way to phrase that for me is um paying a premium with a cherry on top and they would do whatever they could to basically in you into a corner where there was no further buyer competition so that i felt they over inflated the price to their their customer to then justify the price that they paid without any competition so they bought you know below market value because it was never tested

So Veronica and I have had a lot of these conversations over the last two decades behind the scenes talking about the problems in the industry. But that was really what I saw at the cold face. And I thought, okay, well, there's got to be a better way.

So if I go and build this negotiation service, there's a couple of things I've got to do. First of all, it's got to be transparent. The whole industry is all smoke and mirrors. So I've got to live or die by the sword on every negotiation, and it's got to be performance driven.

So it's going to be, you know, analysing properties accurately, giving confidence to the buyer to then set their own price so they remain in control and they set what I call the target price and then being able to easily quantify the saving I made them through performance-driven negotiation.

And that worked really well and it resonated with the media and things so I got a lot of attention at the start of that, stupidly on my behalf because I launched it as Australia's only, you know, no-win, no-fee negotiation service.

So whilst it got a lot of attention and whilst it worked really well, All I attracted was the bottom feeders who didn't want to pay. And then, you know, the more I advertised how much money I was saving, the lower the target prices kept coming. Yeah.

You know, these are silly things you do when you first start out a business. But that was how it was born. And then I developed that over a seven-year period.

Scott, with negotiation though, is that – How do you, because I agree. I mean, I think that's the challenge of agents, right? Like it's, you know, you come into the appraisal, you know, it's not a great property.

You want the listing, you know, because if you don't get the listing, your competitor gets it. And the vendor obviously has a, you know, values their own things more than what the market is. It's just a behavioral bias.

If you tell them the realistic number, they're like, oh, someone so believes in my property more and you lose a listing, right? So you're sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't, right? But on the negotiation side, isn't a lot of the negotiation also bending the the truth a little bit?

Do you feel like because you're acting more for a buyer, though, you're being real with your buyer, but maybe the agent, you're kind of feeding him back. You're playing their own game a little bit back at them.

Yeah. Well, I guess you could take that question two ways. So do you mean that I'm bending the truth back to help the buyer, or do you mean that the negotiator could easily still bend the truth to the purchaser in terms of inflating their expectations of what they need to pay the buyer?

All of the above could happen. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So the latter of that is really true. Like it would be really easy for me to influence you, Chris, in that regard to say to you, well, look, the comparable sales are $750,000, $750,000, $800,000.

You're going to have to pay $850,000 to buy this and here's all the reasons why, even though it's only worth $780,000. That is an incredibly easy thing to do.

So unless you've got a moral compass and that's been the biggest challenge for me is to actually explain to people through marketing when you're competing against all these big buyers agents and all these other people that have got

huge marketing machines that actually it's the moral compass part of it that is so important and that you're dealing with someone that actually is looking after your best interest and is in this long term and doing the right thing so i guess that served me well you know eight years later is that i've now got a business where i probably get three referrals a day um i don't do any marketing it's all organic i didn't even have a website until a couple months ago um so there's that builds and builds and builds over you know lots of transactions and doing the right thing

But yeah, I definitely play the game in reverse. If I answer the first part of your question, if I interpret it the right way, I definitely do that.

And I use my skills, understanding what the buyer's agent is doing to us in reverse to control that narrative as best as possible to reverse the fear of loss onto the seller and to use that in time pressure to an advantage for us to be able to lower the price and save the customer money.

It's not always possible, though, is it, Scott? I mean, in a rising market or when there's a really good asset and you know that there's going to be lots of buyers on that property, you know, the highest bidder is going to be the one that buys the property.

So there are times when saving money isn't the higher objective. There are times when for certain circumstances when securing the property is

But with guardrails, I guess is probably the best way to say that, is a better objective and a better discussion than rather, oh, this is how much money I can save you. Would you agree?

Yes, 100%. And I think that's a bit that a lot of people overlook as well. And it was a problem with the marketing when we merged with the bigger business last year when Huller House was acquired. There was very much a focus on how much money we could save.

But it's very difficult to market the business, that negotiation service, that one of the really big positives is actually winning in traffic.

So when I would actually talk to people and have a one-on-one with someone that's looking at engaging us, I would say, in a lot of instances, I'm not going to be able to save you any money, but I am going to give you a much higher percentage chance that you're going to win in competition and you're not going to overpay.

By virtue of that, you have to be the highest bidder to win it, but it's all about not getting carried away, not spending emotionally, not being bluffed into spending more than you would have otherwise seen value at.

So there's a huge, I think, importance in being honest around that, and I think it's a good point that you address. It's something I bring up all the time with the client.

I think too, you know, you talk about buyer's agents and certainly I'm critical of probably more buyer's agents than I am not critical of, to be quite frank. I'm sure all of our listeners know that.

But when you've got a transactional buyer's agent where for them it's about the deal, it's not really about whether that's the right property for you or the right price, you know, an appropriate price to pay. And then you've also got an agent that's also trying to get the best possible price.

But also, you know, you understand The agent, if there's lots of people on a property, they don't have to try too hard to get the best possible price. They don't even have to negotiate with you. You're competing with other buyers.

And so I've seen many buyer's agent clients get stitched up because they've really got two agents working against them for their own best interest.

Yeah.

But I'm guessing that if someone comes to you and says, right, I want you to negotiate for this property, they've found the property themselves, right? So you're not really trying to transact on something you've recommended necessarily to get that client off your books. You're saying, right, you want to buy this?

We'll work out how to go about buying this so that you don't overpay. Is that sort of the basic pitch?

Yes, but I think to sort of give you a bit of context around that. And the numbers are really loose, as I'm sure you guys have delved into before. But let's say, hypothetically, there's 5% of Australians that use professional paid help. That means 95% of Australians are otherwise going it alone, right?

So my idea was, how do I transform the way that Australians buy property and have a big influence on the industry, not just become one of the thousands of people competing in the lane of being transactional and competing for the 5%? So I very much made an open, not an open...

Not a secret, I should say. I'm trying to say that the right way. But I was going after that 95% to really make a big difference for people. And with that means that I was skilling up the army of people that are going out there looking for their own home.

So yes, I was taking it for granted that you've seen the house you like, Veronica. You've been through multiple times. You might want to get a checklist from me of what you should be looking for. And we're certainly going to analyze that property for you.

And I'll be brutal in the analysis and say, there's only value here. And that was to our detriment at Hello House. And we had that business is that we had to do so much repeat work because we would talk clients out of buying properties all the time.

Properties that they'd fallen in love with, but we couldn't find comparable sales evidence of where the vendor or the agent had positioned it. And we would talk them out of that. And that cost us a lot of extra time and rework, but it's the right thing to do.

And unfortunately, I don't see that happening very much in our industry. There's plenty of really good buyers agents, but there's more transactional people from what I can see. Or at least the transactional agencies have a bigger impact because they're buying volume and you see it more often.

Yeah, I probably agree with that. But the thing is, though, that what you're doing, it's limited in scale. If you're just negotiating, you're not actually doing due diligence or advising them on the colour of the property or anything like that. Is that correct?

You're just literally looking at, okay, how can we work out what the right price to pay is for this property?

Yeah, so we're taking it that you've done the inspection if you're the buyer and you've done your own market research because you've been looking for three months, six months, nine months, whatever it might be, so you have an understanding of where the value sits and lifestyle-wise and those things that are applicable to you.

Most of our clients would have gone and done a building and test report, so they'll have some sort of research. We would complete all the due diligence in terms of the checklist of other things like easements and things

fire flood heritage and those other basic metrics that everyone would need to know because if we're going to run the analysis we need to understand all the red flags there as well right so that's part of our analysis but yeah we there's no way that you can do both things unless you're local and a buyer's agent that's on the ground physically doing those inspections for them it's impossible to have a swing to service 95 of australians because it's such a big country and it's um so broad so that's the compromise with that service it's like okay well the customer has to be involved in the process

But I would argue that whilst that service is compromised in that regard, and I think that's definitely something that should be spoken about, and obviously all of our clients were aware of that because they were hunting for their own property, the flip side of that, of going it alone, it's not even, you know, they're two different outcomes altogether.

You've got people that are taking 10.1 months to buy on their own, 45% of Australians reporting they got buyer's remorse, either overpaid or compromised on the asset or both. Mm-hmm. It's not a great experience. Chris will know this from his clients. The mortgage brokers will give me this feedback all the time.

So I looked at it and thought, okay, well, if I can shorten their days on market, I can increase the quality of the process, the buying process for them and give them security that they bought an asset that they were happy with at the lowest price we could and did the basic level of analysis and due diligence.

And it's a low cost and it's performance driven. Wow. How many ways can I make that as fair as possible and equitable in terms of that decision? The alternative is to go spend a lot more for a localised BA, of course.

Well, that was where I was going to go with that. I thought there obviously must be a cost advantage for the purchaser, for your client. You know, they're getting a better...

they're getting a more thorough, I guess, way of buying a property or a better way of buying a property, but it's a sort of cut-down version of a local buyer's agent and so, therefore, there must be a cost advantage. Can you tell us sort of generally how does the cost model work?

I mean, I would say that what we don't do on The Elephant in the Room is get people to promote their businesses, but I'm keen to understand the delta between, say, a service such as yours and a full search service with a buyer's agent. Sure.

Well, so the first thing to address is I don't have that business anymore, right? So I'm not operating that model and doing that today. So that's not in existence.

So our fee when I finished at Hollow House on average was $7,200 for people that were going it alone doing, you know, that sort of buyer assist rather than extra work that could have been added onto that.

I think the key thing to understand if you're putting this into some sort of context though is what my –

My realisation was, and that was sort of my expectation when I went to set this business up in the first place as well, is that the 95% of people aren't looking for a buyer's agent. They don't want a buyer's agent. They either don't know you exist as a localised buyer's agent.

They certainly don't want to pay you 2.5% or whatever some of these buyer's agents are getting. So it's either going it alone and making a dog's breakfast of it or it's paying a fraction of the cost for a performance-driven thing as an insurance policy. So I looked at it as that.

It's like, okay, well, that's a really good halfway house, if you like, for the vast majority of Australians.

And I think more and more, having gone through that for seven years, people have come out of the woodwork, certainly in the last six months, to say, really, that is the future of how Australians are going to transact. There has to be more of that because it has to be affordable.

It can't be, you know, 2.5% of the purchase cost because stamp duty is so high and there's so many other costs involved.

Well, that's it. There's a real limit. Yeah, there's a limit to how many people can afford a buyer's agent.

Well, and they don't want to spend it a lot of the time. The amount of time I spend educating clients, I'll spend 30 minutes. They've got the cash. They are buying in a very competitive market. They've been looking for too long. It's a grudge purchase.

Analysis paralysis.

Analysis paralysis. They're a perfect client to be speaking to a buyer's agent. We refer them to someone very, very experienced who's been doing it 10, 20 years, you know, got a small business. They're a great operator. They know how to close a deal.

So it's not the buyer's agent who... And it just doesn't happen, right? There's an anxiety about paying that fee because it is quite a large fee. And I think... you know, your service does sit quite nicely with those because they know they need help, but they don't want the full service.

And a lot of buyer's agents sometimes offer the negotiation service, but sometimes it's also a way of just trying to upsell their bigger service. And the client feels like that. They feel like, oh, they know that if they miss out on this one, that they're going to pitch me the full service.

Because if you found that as well, Veronica, in terms of buyer's agents, they sort of, they come in with this somewhat negotiation service, but really it's just masks to get them on the full service.

Yes, I can imagine that that is the gateway service in many cases. I know in my own business, you know, if somebody comes in with a property that they've found and if it's a great property, then great. We're delighted to help them with an evaluate, negotiate service to buy that property.

But quite often with a local buyers agency, they'll come in with a property that's really shit. Yeah, that's true. And so we've got to go through that whole process of,

having them see how shit it is you know which is part of our evaluation process but so it's not as cynical as that but we often talk to them to say look you know let's talk about a full search first and if you want to go for this property we're happy to cap it at the fee it would be just to evaluate that property if you buy it within say two weeks of its auction date um so we sort of give them the best of both worlds but they they also know what they're up for if um

So it's not meant to be a loss leader. But, Scott, I'm curious too because you scaled the business, you sold Hello House, and now you're back in the negotiation business. You're going to put up Mark 2, whatever that is going to be.

Like you said, you don't have a website yet, but watch this space, I guess. Yeah. You know, you scouted, you had, I don't know, a lot of negotiators on your team.

I mean, the best negotiators, wouldn't you think the best negotiators are working for the best agents and they're out there selling property, wouldn't you? Or they're, you know, they're really good buyers agents and they're working out there, they're the top of their game.

How do you get an army of negotiators that can do the job as well as you could do the job? Because it's a high degree of emotional intelligence, psychology, reading people, understanding dialogue, being able to hit dialogue.

There's so much understanding the whole process and understanding when they're being fed a lie versus when they're not. You know what I mean? There's so many nuances to it. How do you train those skills at scale?

First of all, starting with people that have been in the agent seat for a significant amount of time themselves. So every one of the team that I had were ex-agents and I would never hire anyone in that seat unless they were. You have to know both sides of the coin.

So I find it laughable when you see buyer's agents doing negotiation masterclasses and they've been a buyer's agent for two years or three years. They've never sat on the other side of the coin. They have no idea the process that the agent's going through.

And this is the stuff that we have to deal with all the time, right? So that's the first thing. They have to come from a longevity in the industry and understand-

Are they retired?

No, I mean, people leave for different reasons. Like, you know, this is the thing that I reckon I've got to convey a belt forever of real estate agents that want to leave being real estate agents for the same reason I left.

There is such a high turnover of good quality people who don't want to miss school sport on Saturday, don't want to be in a suit all day, don't want to drive a BMW, don't want to have a Coke, you know, habit anymore or whatever they do in the eastern suburbs or low and offshore or wherever else they are.

Like, people are over that lifestyle, right? And they want to have a well-paid job where they are involved in the client.

And when you flip, you know this, when you flip to the other side, all of a sudden you go from like part of the job that I hated as a real estate agent was you're almost fighting with your vendor to get them to a level where they're going to see reality.

And you're fighting with the buyers to get them to a level where your vendor is going to trade at. You flip to the buy side working for the buyers and it's all roses. Like they trust you. They like you. You're there to protect them. And it's a much nicer job day to day.

So there's an easier sell for me to be able to bring people across from the real estate agency side and say, okay, great. I can still pay you well. You're probably not going to get those really high numbers, but it's not going to be the same level of stress.

It's not going to be the same hours necessarily. And it's just a much nicer job. And there's a lot of people that will take less money for a better quality of life. And it worked out well. But there is a balance to that.

You said, how can everyone be as good a negotiator as me? You know, I don't... I'd like to think I'm really good at it from doing it lots, but without the ego, you know, take that bit away from it.

You're not going to have everyone that's at the same level as you or me, Veronica, have done it for that long. It's an experience thing. So then the only thing that I could do to replicate that is coach.

So, you know, twice a week for an hour, breaking down every single deal that went through that we won or lost.

actually the best thing i ever did was uh at the start of last year i sort of challenged myself i'm going to write every day on linkedin and and what i did is i went into those sales meetings on a monday and a thursday and i just took notes pages and pages of notes of what you said to the agent and what happened next you know what the buyer did and then what the agent said or whatever it was and i took all these notes and then i was all able to go there and sit in quiet and then break down the psychology of the buying process and negotiation process

Me then putting that into words, like a storytelling piece, my staff, the team just go, okay, now we get it. Like how you think, how you do it differently, what you're looking for. Literally right before we took the start of this call, I just did a deal in Sydney for six mil.

And the first thing I did is call my lead BA and say, have you got 10 minutes? He's like, yep. So great. Let's talk about this deal. This is what I said. This is what they did. This was the lead up to it. This is what I said. That's how I framed it.

And that was the outcome. And he's like, okay, that's awesome. Great. So we're just constantly honing the craft because we want to be better, right? And we want to save our clients money. And that's worked really well for me over the years.

I like your posts. You know, I recommend anyone ever read it. I mean, I read them, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Don't we that? Heard that one before? Yeah, totally.

I mean, a lot of buyers agents talk about, When you talk about their value propositions, they'll say, look, it's the local market knowledge. There's also local agent knowledge.

And then they'll also say that we know how all the different agents in the area, we know how they like to work, whether they go to auction or like to sell prior or whether they like you to come in strong or whether you like to start low because they like to condition their vendor and they don't like it when I do this.

I think one of the benefits of your service is you can scale nationally because you're not –

on the street looking at properties right um and how do you get that read of the agents profiles and the different agents and you know how to negotiate with them the best because every agent works differently how do you get that really fast to help you win the negotiation

ask really good questions and listen intently at the responses. And you can cut through all of that, I think, in seconds. Like really quickly, you get an understanding of that. And I just ask brutal questions to people straight up and wait till they answer the question.

And I just keep asking it in different ways till I get the answer. Sometimes I don't. You can't win them all. Some people just won't crack.

And what you learn as well when you do this at scale is that I can tell you many of the highest profile agents in Australia and how they negotiate because they use the same strategy over and over again.

I know.

It's actually astounding. You can punch holes through it, right, and work it out. But because I've done that so much, like thousands of this, you can work out who's playing those games pretty quickly, what types of games they're playing, and you can call BS on these things as well.

So I'll give you a really simple example. This is really simple. So, you know, this is not the high-level negotiation, but if I ring you, Chris, and say, you're the sales agent, and I say, you know, what buys it, Chris? Yeah. That's my favorite question. What buys it?

Because you have to give me an answer to that, right? What are you going to do? What are you going to say? Are you going to give me a number? Are you going to tell me a story? Are you going to say no?

They fumble usually.

Yeah. So it's in that question that you hang yourself straight away. Yep. So if you start telling me a story, well, you know, we've had a heap of interest. We've got so much interest in it. And look, we've got 15 contracts out. Okay. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

yeah keep going keep going because you work out in human psychology the more someone has to tell a story they're not telling the truth right a good agent in that instance will say to you something really quickly because you ask this question hundreds of times a week you know you you see these patterns really clearly so if i ask you that question you said look we've had an offer at 650 the vendor's at 680 680 buys it that's a simple answer somewhere between 670 and 680 probably gets it over the line but you have to be at that level and you've got to move reasonably quickly because the 650 guy's still in right that's a legit answer

And someone can rattle that off straight away. And then, you know, okay, well, then I know where the lay of the land is. Now, I don't trust that agent. So, I still don't take that as gospel.

But at least I can get a feel of are they playing games or is there a high percentage chance they're telling the truth? Yeah. So, you can weave, you know, you can weave these stories together very quickly. So, I don't know that, like, I definitely see the advantage of course.

It's non-negotiable that if you've got that Deep knowledge locally, that's an advantage in that. But in terms of a negotiator, that out trumps deep market knowledge locally, I think, if you're a good negotiator. So if you can do the two of those things, all power to you.

But there's just not that many people that are really strong negotiators that also have really strong local market and that are only focused on local market because a lot of those people, like me, are doing it nationally, you know, and scaling and doing other things and taking that to a wider audience.

Do you feel like you not have, you know, like I say, it's a property in, I don't know, Timbuktu, and you don't know the agent, but you don't also know the local market, right? Like the reality is your clients come to you.

Like how does that sort of, you know, using local past sales in the area and, you know, I guess how does that hold you back in any way with the negotiation?

Like when you haven't actually been through past sales, you haven't been to the auctions and, you know, that comparison to drive the agent to sort of take this offer, like you're kind of conditioning the agent to then condition the vendor, right? Is that hold you back at all?

Or do you find that you have to just do a bit more digging prior to speaking to the agent to really know the comparables? How do you get that market knowledge fast?

Well, I mean, there's certain markets where there's not a lot of comparable sales evidence and that makes it really difficult. And some of the times when you're dealing in markets like that, the agents will actually make it really easy for you anyway.

So a lot of the regional or less experienced agents will lead you to the finish line in a pot of gold straight away with one or two questions.

So that whole thing of is that a problem, it rarely is a problem for us because you can find your way through that pretty quickly with the right questions and digging. When... I'm in a situation, though, where I am unsure about where the price sits if it's a unique property.

It might be something like, you know, I'm trying to buy something in Balmain where Veronica is the expert and it might have a view, right, or it might be a difficult asset to replicate. So there's a fear of loss.

You know there's going to be a lot of buyers that are in the marketplace. Someone will pay a premium for that because it's difficult to replicate. And in that instance, I would ring three or four local estate agents as well and I would say, okay, I'm looking at 12 Smith Street in Roselle.

What's it worth? And a lot of the times I say, actually, one of my buyers has been through there, but they've already offered 2.7. They've rejected it. I know the vendor we missed out on the listing. They were dead set on three and a half. The agent always under quotes.

So I get that sort of marketing intel pretty quickly from people around that sale that gives me that local knowledge and will give me a few extra data points that helps me arrive at a number.

But this is a really interesting thing and maybe this will shock you, Chris, might not shock Veronica, but I basically never use comparable sales in any negotiation. Okay. It's irrelevant to me.

As in, do you use them to formulate the price guidance for your client and then just don't use them in the negotiation or do you not look at them at all? Correct. No, no, no.

We're incredibly dialed in on what the puppy's worth before I open my mouth.

We don't use it either. There's no point putting...

But I never use it in any conversation whatsoever because an agent could not give two tosses at what you think it's worth or what you base it on. It is all about what is the lowest price your seller is prepared to take, what is the highest price your buyer is prepared to spend.

The rest of it is a grey area in the middle. I coach people to get to the grey area as quickly as possible and then whoever bluffs best wins. Yep. End of. That's negotiation. That's pretty much it.

And I agree, there's people that want to put forward an essay and a case for themselves, you know, in their offers. It's like, don't waste your time. It's just pure luck if that works.

And all you do is insult vendors and agents when you start beating around the head with comparable sales as well. Totally. Yeah.

Yeah, you're the smartest person in the room. No one likes that.

You're not going to buy it because no one's going to work with you.

And for every 12 Smith Street that you tell me, I've got 14 Smith Street that just sold off market yesterday that you don't know about, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

It's just a one-upmanship. You've negotiated, okay, thousands of deals, but I mean, what patterns or mistakes do you see unrepresented buyers repeating? I mean, I guess you're not really seeing the buyers making the mistakes these days, but Go back to your sales agent days.

What are some of the things that buyers do do that shoots themselves in the foot?

Yeah, at Listing Loop, I was really lucky that I had normally eight meetings a day on the hour, every hour, with a buyer that was in a holding pattern that couldn't get it right themselves.

Many of those were just starting out, but most of those were three, six, nine, 18 months into the process and couldn't do it themselves. So I was really lucky that I had a front row seat to understand what mistakes buyers would make. And really, the main one is strategy.

So strategy is the biggest, not having one. Yeah. And so people, the easiest way to break that down is I'd be on the phone call with you, Veronica, and I'd ask you a series of questions of what you're looking for.

And in the back end of my computer, I'm in realestate.com in the sold section, and I'm putting in all the filters that you told me that you're looking for. And then I'll say to you, totally understand that, you know, I've got empathy with you, Veronica.

I can see why you've been looking for 10 months because it hasn't been a fucking sale for three years. Yeah. Yeah, that meets your criteria.

And they say, I'm just waiting until one comes. And I'm like, it's not going to because everything you want is selling for more than you can afford. You're not even looking at them. I'm on a personal mission to help more people make better property decisions.

You know, most people don't realise that they can cost themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars over the medium to long term when they make property decisions without all of the information that they need. And what I do is help people with tricky real estate problems.

which often masquerade as simple questions like, should I sell my investment property because the interest repayments are hurting or should I buy before I sell or the other way around? You can connect with me and access all of the tools that I've created to help you make better property decisions at veronicamorgan.com.au.

And there you will find resources for first home buyers, details about my buyer's agent mentoring program. You can connect with my Sydney-based property management and buyer's agency teams, Australia-wide vendor advocacy, or ask me for introduction to the small group of buyer's agents that I would personally recommend across the country. That's veronicamorgan.com.au.

If you're looking to buy your first home, thinking of upgrading to a new one or purchasing an investment property anywhere in Australia, we would love to carefully guide you through this journey and importantly, get the finance right.

Yeah. So strategy is where it starts. And it was very often that I'd say, okay, great. Well, then let me just do a couple of things and play around with this.

If I go from a five bed down to a four bed, for example, or I go from 600 square meters minimum lot to 400 square meters, if I go from, you know, 800 grand to 830 grand, if I go from Balmain and Roselle, but now we include Lilyfield or Annandale, all of a sudden I can see now with just those little tweaks, whatever those tweaks were, or a combination of those, now I can see there's 20 properties sold in the last 30 years.

Yeah. Now, are you willing to compromise on a fifth bedroom or would you do a 400 square metre block instead of 600? Would you live in Annandale or Lilyfield if, you know, you could afford that scenario? And the reality is for most people, they are.

They just don't realise that that's all they had to do to change their life was just look outside their little world and their bubble and see. So strategy was most important for me. Second thing is...

Being misled by price by agents is the obvious one that is key because, you know, the question I said to you before, what buys it? Most buyers, you know, having sat in the agent chair for so long like Veronica, no one asks questions like that. No, they don't.

Stupid questions like how many contracts have you got out?

Wise of indoor selling.

Yep, yep. What's the guide price?

Yep.

Yep. So, all of these things are just an open letter to a real estate agent to craft their own narrative to screw you over, right? So, the throwaway answer was for in Sydney with how many contracts you've got out, it's three or four. Yeah, four.

Now, if I told you there was 15, it'd scare you off. If I told you there was one, it's human psychology. You don't think there's any interest in the property, so you lose interest in it, right? People want what they can't have.

So all the agents just train themselves to know that the simple answer to that is three to four. It creates competition on you. I can leverage that at a later point in a negotiation and you're screwed, right? You're behind the eight ball because I'll play on your emotions. Same with the guide price.

Like the guide price ain't worth the toilet paper it's written on, which is my throwaway line that I always use. It's got no relevance to market value whatsoever. So asking those questions or making a key value decision based on what the agent's Quoting you is just ridiculous.

So you need to determine really what market value is and how to understand how to analyze properties and work out where the value pockets are within suburbs and what the pros and cons are where people are trading up or down on price, you know, pros or cons for those homes.

So price is a really big thing that they get influenced by the agent. And then probably the one that, you know, throws everyone is being outbluffed. It's very easy. Like you pick up a phone and say to an agent, I've got an interest in the property.

The next thing they always say is, well, we've just had an offer or we've got an offer coming in or we've just issued a contract or I'm actually here now. I'm just showing someone through for a third time.

They introduce buyer competition straight into the conversation and you've got to be able to understand how to bluff them, how to not get bluffed. And that is near impossible for a buyer because it is experiencing that and understanding the right question to ask and

what the highest percentage play, the response is that's going to come back, how you then circumnavigate to take the conversation and control the narrative.

There's so many things that are important in that space and no buyer should be doing that by themselves, I don't believe, or really has, not many people, even if they've bought 10 times, I would dare say you have absolutely no idea what you're doing in the grand scheme of things compared to someone that does it day in, day out.

But even the buyer's agents that have been around for a very short period of time, the agents, like they laugh at how gullible they are and how they swallow all their lines. And, you know, like your question, you know, what will buy this?

You know, it's a hard question to answer in many ways, right? So some agents don't actually know. You know, they don't know what will buy it. And you've got to sort of try to work out how well, how in control is the owner?

And there's a whole bunch of stuff that you'll be picking up from however they answer that. But on the flip side of that, you've got agents that will come to a buyer and say things like, okay, well, thanks for your interest.

If someone comes in with an offer higher than that, should I call you?

You know, like, I mean, how do you answer that without giving the game away? You've still got more money. Or, you know, no, don't call me. Oh, my God, I don't want to miss out on it.

So the agents have got loads of questions like that, which are designed to pin a buyer into the corner and basically get you to show whether you've got more money. Yep.

And knowing how to answer that is exactly – and under pressure and they will come at you with questions that you would not have thought of and you're not anticipating. And you go, oh, there's my offer and it expires at close of business.

Yeah, take it by 6 o'clock or I'm out. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That old chestnuts.

Which doesn't work either. Scott, where's the – you know, obviously –

I'm useless at buying, so hands in the air. You know, I tell the agents... Useless at buying. Yeah, and they always just tell me to shut up, to be honest, and don't even talk.

Because I just want to talk to them, I want to chat about the market, what's going on, you know, so I share way too much. So what are the things when... Yeah, because you can always save a client, right, as long as they haven't signed the contract, right?

But what are the sort of things where you think, oh, I just really wish you didn't do that? Where are the things that, you know, it's really hard for you to sort of unwind to get a bit more power back in the negotiation?

Is there anything that sort of stands out where, you know, because Price sometimes says, well, I can't offer less because they know I've got a budget for $2 million. But, you know, you can get around things like that. But what are some of the things?

Well, they might have already offered something and then they come to you. How often does that happen?

Yeah, a lot, a lot. So putting their foot in with price is obviously the key one that people do all the time. So even clients that are working with me, I'll say, don't talk price, don't talk price.

When the agent asks you and pins you in the corner and asks you, they're going to ask you in 10 different ways. And they might not ask you what you want to pay for it, but they might ask, Where does this sit compared to the last one that you really liked that sold?

Or what's the best comparable for this that you think you've seen? Or whatever. They'll ask loaded questions that is going to be used against you in a court of law in a week's time when you go to negotiate or whenever that might be.

So price is a key one because people will throw out a number, not realize that they will think nothing of it, but then the agent will hang me on that later on and I've got to unwind it and start again and So that's one key thing.

I think a few of the things that people don't think about maybe that is maybe a subconscious thing that people do that gives away a lot of power in a negotiation is often a buyer of mine will go through twice.

And then I'll start negotiations and then they'll say, I'm going back again at two o'clock or three o'clock. I'm like, don't, don't, don't go back again.

Like as soon as you start showing buying signs like that, that you're emotionally connected, because now you're going to, I bet you, you bring your mom or your sister or your dad or your, exactly. And now all you're doing is making my job harder. So go to ground, don't return their phone calls.

Of course, just refer it all back to me and channel it back to that one place. So it's those little subtle signs like that, that as an agent, you're like, oh my God, there's, you know, pin a tail on the donkey right there. Like that's an easy one.

I know you're emotionally connected and I know I'm going to push you harder for that. There's also, they'll give away their cards in terms of answering questions.

Like if I was an agent, I might say to you, you know, earlier on in the piece, you know, where does this need to be positioned for you to have interest in it? Yeah, those types of questions. Have you got anything else that you're seriously chasing at the moment?

And then when you come to me in a week's time or three days' time and say, oh, we've already got another one that we're really interested in, I'm like, okay, sure you do. Yep, because otherwise you would have bought that. You know what I mean?

So there are all those little things like that that if you answer these questions, it is going to be used against you.

So even back when I was an agent, so I finished in 2016, even then that last four years or six years of my work, I had an Excel spreadsheet that I built for every –

vendor and every single day i sent them the spreadsheet it was with everyone's name the date they inspected whether or not they had a contract whether or not they'd done a building and pest report every single contact point and all the notes from the conversations and i color-coded them as to the level of interest they had in any offers that they made every single day i sent that to my vendors so you can be sure chris that when you rang me in week three and say you know this is only worth 950 i'll be like well you told me three weeks ago you'd pay 980 for it

Or whatever, I've got it all documented and I've got it right in front of me. And as soon as you pick up the phone, bang, I know that you're on the hook and I know what else you've seen.

I've recorded that I saw you at an auction because we were at every single auction of all of our competitors. We knew how much money you had because we'd asked you those questions previously. So it's about building all these data points. And that was 10 years ago or whatever, nearly 10 years ago.

So no doubt the agents are doing that at a much greater level again.

The CRMs are helping them do that to a much more sophisticated, in a much more sophisticated way these days than back then.

Yeah, mine was super basic, but it was effective.

It's the same principle, but yeah.

Just on that, so like the client, you know, because when you're in the market, they might come to you a bit late, right? They're not like...

oh i want to buy a property i'm going to call scott you know like they usually go and get some pain same as buyers agents i feel like buyers agents they sort of you know have to sort of chase the ambulance a little bit the painful buyers are the ones who'll pay for the service right not the ones that haven't gone through any pain yet because they don't realize how hard it is though and they often go uh they often say oh i'll see how i go first and i'm like well that's quite a costly wait because you're already in september and if you don't make this happen in the

And so how do you, and by then every agent knows them. You know, they've seen Jack and Jill at every single open home and they know Jill's pregnant and they know how keen they are and they know they love this type of property because they went crazy when they saw.

How do you sort of wind them back to, in the agent's mind, sort of reframe those buyers? Do you keep them anonymous? What are the ways you sort of wind them back so you get more power in the negotiation? Yeah.

Yeah, that's an interesting question.

I agree with everything you said there because that's a real consistent theme with what I see when we're at Huller House as well is that the clients want to just give it a go first and have a crack at it and then often come back with their tail between their legs after they've lost like three or four times and spent however much time and money doing it.

And there's obviously, as people get more and more educated about the benefits of it, there's a lot more people that choose to put their head up and say, I don't want to go through that 10 months of headaches. Sign me up now and we'll do it right in the first place.

But to answer the question, for the ones that have gone that far, they're emotionally connected, the agents know who they are and what they're chasing specifically. It still comes back to me, you know,

Building rapport really quickly with the agent so that I can have a proper relationship and a proper chat with them so that I can try to get some sort of control in that conversation to the best of my ability. Not always possible, but that's the goal for me to build rapport really quickly.

Ideally, at any stage in a negotiation in terms of how long they've been on the market, the buyer, I can introduce leverage to reverse the fear of loss and try to put the vendor under some sort of pressure.

But as Veronica will know, that will depend on how much competition you've got, where it is in what stage of the campaign that you get it at. But I try to get to these properties at the earliest stage I possibly can, even if you're 10 months into the search in that instance.

And in doing so, then use potentially in that instance, this is one of, you know, an arsenal of different things you could do, but potentially at that point, it'd be trying to buy it before the first open for inspection or try to buy it very quickly on the Monday after the first open for inspection.

and it's using a second property as leverage or an anchor property at that point that might work in that scenario. Really what you've got to work out is, is the seller motivated to sell?

And there's a whole heap of different reasons why they are, but typically it's because they're nervous, they've already bought somewhere, they're under financial pressure or they're sick. You know, they're the kind of four big ones that I see consistently.

If they are, and if you've established that the agent is open to selling it quickly or you've established that the agent is transactional, of which a huge portion of real estate agents in Australia are transactional, they'll take a quick sale over a higher price that they can get

a week later just to move on to the next thing. It's very lazy, similar that we're debating in the buyer's agent world, but very common on the sales side as well. So you've got to work out who you're dealing with.

If you're dealing with an agent that's a Ray White auction trained agent, for example, that's very difficult to talk them out of the property week one or even prior to auction because they've been trained to have their four weeks in the sun. They know that's how they build profile.

If they can list and last in the industry, they've got to have their signboards up. They've got to have their neighbors. They've got to be telling that story of their success out in the sunshine, not behind closed doors.

So you have to pick your battles with who you're dealing with, know your enemy in that regard, and then use different tools like that that are going to be applicable to the circumstances. So again, this is an experience thing because there's not a one-size-fits-all strategy here. I can't

go out and coach and say, use an anchor property every time or tell them that you, you know, you blah, blah, blah by this. You just can't do that. It's horses for courses.

That's it. And you do that and then they find out that's your, that's your modus operandi anyway. And it's, well, that's how he buys every property. What about auction though? Do you guys bid at auction?

Very infrequently. I mean, I was an auction-trained agent, so I'm anti-buying an auction for all those reasons. Like, if a client has to go to auction, we'll bid and do our best to buy it at the lowest possible price.

But my own personal belief is you've lost complete control or a lot of majority of control going to auction because you can't control, you know, the depth of the pockets that you're competing against. You can't control the vendor's motivation. You can't control the agent's actions under that.

You can do everything within your own power, but you're still never in complete control. I would always try and buy it prior if it's at the right price.

That is the case with all negotiation when you're buying real estate because the agent always knows more than you do. And the vendor is always going to be out of control in terms of out of your control.

I mean, sometimes we puppet the agent because we can see that they are not managing the vendor well enough. I would say it's interesting. We track auction pre-sales versus ad auction sales, and most times you are paying your premium on average at auction.

There's no doubt about it, but there are some times you can't avoid going to auction. We've just seen it flip. Just in the last month or so in Sydney, just seen it flip where people are paying more on average pre-auction than they are at auction. Yeah, interesting.

It's different everywhere. Obviously, there's markets within markets right across the country, so it's difficult for me to take a view on what the market's doing at any given point. But I find that if it's going to auction,

it's typically because they've either, you know, they've got buyer competition or they've got a vendor that has been, that's got inflated expectations.

Now, they may have been inflated by the agent and the agent needs the option to condition them or they're inflated by their own self-worth and, you know, the agent still needs that process to run it. So,

I find that we try to weed out those motivated sellers at the right price early and reduce our buyer competition because my strike rate at auction is poor.

And I would, having done it so many times and been a part of, you know, I'm sure a thousand auctions or whatever over 30 years, I just won't be swayed any other way that that's the way to buy property. It's just not for me having been on both sides of the fence before.

And just I know the conversion rate for us is just not good at auction because, yeah, you can only go to where you see value.

And beyond that, we almost always get mowed down by bank and mum and dad or someone with bigger pockets that effectively overpays the property where there's no comparable sales evidence to give us faith that it's the right number. There can be a lot of that.

So I'm just not going to take that risk with my clients. Right.

I was reading something the other day. I think it was a Pareto principle, you know, 20% of, you know, the agents would sell 80% of the properties. I think it was like, I think it was 10, 10% of selling 60%, I think the article was.

But so, you know, a lot of it's going to the big fish in the markets, right? And they take a long time to get there. Then they try to dominate that market for as long as possible, right? But when you're dealing with those sort of,

let's say the other 40% of properties are sold by the other 90% of the agents, right? And some have been doing it for two minutes, some have been doing it for two years.

How do you sort of work with them when you know that like their sales skills on getting the vendor over the line is actually not that great and you feel like you've got to

Give them the story to then tell their vendor why they should take the offer because they're just so fresh and they're still learning the rules of the game.

It's Christmas morning for me, Chris, when that happens. I absolutely love unwrapping that process. Yeah, that's joy to me.

yeah i love it um so i mean the simple thing is always going to be rapport right rapport is everything to me so as quickly as possible um build a relationship with that agent um and it's about meeting people where they're at so you might be very analytical chris veronica might be a chatter who you know wants to have a talk you know i'll i'll find a way to make friends with the grandma that wants to talk about her grandkids

I'll find a way to talk to the 21-year-old about they're just new to the industry and how much fun it is or blah, blah, blah, whatever, right? Find a way to meet them where they're at. So that gives them confidence to open up the dialogue with you.

They'll always tell you more if they know, like, and trust you, right? So that's the first thing I do is rapport is everything. The trick that I do, I would say, is that I write a lot. I do a lot of my negotiation by SMS, right?

And if I've got an inexperienced agent and even sometimes a very, very experienced agent because they'll do exactly the same thing, it's just human psychology, I will write word for word what I would say to close that vendor if I was the agent that the agent can never say because they will burn the relationship with them and they'll never do it.

So I will literally write it for them because I know word for word they're going to forward that email or that SMS straight to their customer because they know they want to say it but they can't say it. They cannot say it because it will kill their campaign.

So I pre-frame the whole thing and I'll write it out, give them all the reasons why this is the thing. So it's almost like me being able to write it directly straight to the vendor. Yeah. And that has worked a treat for me over the years.

But if you have, if they have other buyers swarming around, they're not going to need that from you. You know what I mean?

But that's the same with every negotiation. If there's other people around there, then you lose those opportunities and you've got to come up with other ways.

So you're utilising that. So effectively you're helping them do their job because they're not going to sell it otherwise.

Yeah, totally. And I mean, you can never change that. If there's buyer competition that you've got in it, well, then you simply have to just always fall on your comparable sales evidence and where you've got confidence to act. If it goes beyond that, you're out.

If you can buy it within that range, you buy it. And that goes back to that, well, we might not have saved any money, but we won it in buyer competition and we didn't have to overpay for it. You know, you secured that property in traffic, which is a win.

yeah how do you really um when the property is not great um you know i guess as you it happens with us all the time you know as you get more experience you get more market knowledge you understand things a little bit more complex you you get better understanding what's a good asset or what are some of the compromises your buyers are overlooking and

You know, and then they'll jump on a call with me and I'll say, hang on a sec. I know those are all great things and you're convincing yourself, but you do realise that's one of the busiest roads in town and you've got massive privacy problems. Oh, but it's beautiful.

You know what I mean? Like, so as a negotiator, how are you managing that complex with your clients? Like, are you literally saying, hey... you know, really you should reconsider buying this property. I think you should keep looking and playing the long game. How do you do it?

Everything for me comes back to transparency and just being honest with people. So I will call it and say to them, like, there's a train line out the back.

I loved Veronica's post this morning on LinkedIn, which I commented on, that, you know, a difficult property to sell now is going to be a difficult property for you effectively. I butchered your quote, but a difficult property for you to sell, you know, later on.

And I will say, you know, words of that.

Easy to buy, hard to sell.

Yeah, exactly. I told you I'd butcher it. But the same message, right? Like, you know, so I will say to them, these are the challenges with this property. It's next to a childcare centre. That's going to affect capital growth. It's on a roundabout. It's got a bus stop out the front. It's whatever.

It's got a flood zone crossing part of the land. These are things that are going to impact other buyers in future. So we address those things.

I think that's really important that, you know, my post today on LinkedIn was about another major buyer's agency that a friend of mine at Thumbtack was with for six months plus. They put a property in front of him that was in a flood zone. They did all the due diligence.

They presented it as a flood zone. And then, you know, just a dog shit asset in an average location. And then he said to me, I just cannot make sense of this. No rhyme or reason. Like this doesn't look like a good property, but they're really pushing me to buy it.

I'm like, they're really pushing you to buy it because you've been there for six months plus and they want to get rid of you. And this is just a really lazy way of doing that.

So, the opposite of that for us is we would present that property to you if you, for example, if you had put that property to us, I would have raised that. And I said, okay, well, it's in a flood zone. That's impacted my appraised number, my market estimate.

And that's something that we need to talk about. We need to workshop because that will impact the buy competition that you've got. So, I think it's really important to do that. But I don't know how...

people are doing these things or cutting corners because it's very easy to have an emotional buyer and you go, yeah, right, that's it. You know, that number 1,417 Princess Highway is a beautiful spot. Yeah, you should buy it.

Oh, it's the only way I'm going to get in the market. It's the only way I'm going to get in. Yeah. You know, it's hard because... I mean, when buyers are bringing you something as well, they've already invested emotionally in buying that property.

And I know that ourselves and when people come to us when they're looking for an evaluate and negotiate service, they've decided they want to buy it, which is why they're willing to pay someone to help them buy it. And it's like they don't really want to hear straight up. Like it's taken –

Early on, I used to turn clients away all the time. And then I'd find that they'd go and bloody bite themselves anyway without any help. And the agent would nail their feet to the floor.

And I went, okay, we'll take you on, but we have to go through the process of showing you and taking the unveiling why we won't recommend it. And if we do go ahead and buy it, at least you'll get your eyes wide open and you won't overpay. Totally.

So to the point that we were talking about earlier about, you know, localised VAs versus people going alone and doing it themselves, there's a point at which you have to step back and do a 10,000-foot view and go, these people are adults. It's their own money. Yeah. They live in the suburb already.

They want to live there. It's the only place they can afford that they're falling in love with. The kids love it and they want to buy it. That's great. That's cool. My job is to buy it at the best possible price, but highlight those concerns.

I'm not going to say to them, don't buy it. And then you're looking for another 10 months because you can't afford anything else. You have to be commercial about it as well. Right.

But what if they're not local? Like what if they are buying investment across the country or they're relocating and they really don't know? I mean, that's that they really need a buyer's agent.

They need a local. I mean, I had a client literally that same situation last year. And, um, You know, used a buyer's agent. They already picked the buyer's agent before they came to me, right? I've already engaged these guys, but I want to work with you.

And, you know, then they're sending me the properties the buyer's agent's recommending. Massive organisation, you know, buying, you know, one of the biggest out there in terms of this investment space. And it was the... And they keep sending... The properties they kept sending me were just...

horrible like you know we're talking back and on to power lines we've got the worst streets in the suburb how can you buy a hundred yeah how can you buy a hundred of these things a month in these in these cities like there is not a hundred good properties a month that come on the market for an investor there are not but there's 20 buyers agencies like big agencies buying 50 of them a month or 75 of the month and 83 of them are off market it's like you know

Yeah, we've seen this. Veronica and I have sat on the other side of it. Chris, no doubt you've seen a lot of this yourself as well.

But there is not a week that goes by that I don't get a past customer or a friend or a family member say, hey, I'm looking at this property. Can you please run your eyes over it? And it's a dog shit asset.

And it's through one of these brand name buyers agencies that charge them a fortune. And I'll give you an example. One of these very high profile ones in a big city in Australia is called the catcher by the agents on the ground, right?

And it's because you throw them any shit and they catch everything. Yeah, and that's the reputation they've got within the agents. But then out there, you know, winning awards and all the rest of it is kind of, you know, one of the top dogs in the country.

It's like it's just the whole thing is done wrong.

It's so appalling. And, like, I talk to sales agents across the country and I get their stories and it's mortifying, absolutely mortifying. But, anyway, we don't want to do that. Do you want a Dumbo for us?

We don't refer to that person. But it might be a similar person. It might not be. But, yeah. I mean, when the first one came, I was like, oh. And it's always a bit weird because we don't refer there.

Then we only get these situations or situations when they've bought them, they've come to us years down the line. So we've got lots of those stories where clients have come to us. Oh, how did you buy that? Oh, who bought that? And then so-and-so. I was like, oh, okay.

But this was one where it was like the first one was like really bad. And the next one had been on the market. Everything is selling in days. This one had been on the market for six, eight weeks. It was literally the bottom end.

And I think that's just really, really frustrating because the client was like, you know, at the mercy of the buyer's agent, right? And I think that's one of the biggest challenges you might see from negotiation is that you put your trust in someone and then obviously they're not buying you the quality stuff.

You're sort of, you're double losing, right? And you're overpaying. Have you got a property Dumbo for us here? The volume part of it is a concern. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think...

Well, yeah, you go. There you go. That's the question, yep.

I'm waiting for your Dumbo. Yep.

Oh, Dumbo of the week. All right. Well, for me, I had this a couple of weeks ago, which is very relevant for me, and it's something that I've had a lot over my career.

I probably haven't taken a huge amount of notice of it, but I had to have a bit of a chuckle with my customer. Last week or the week before. So we'd made an offer on a property and it was first weekend on the market.

And the agent told us, don't give me an offer before the Saturday because it's not going to do you any help. Wait till the Monday and then I'll be able to hopefully put this together.

I just need to show them that basically no one else turns up at the price level and we can get started.

it's done so we make the offer on the monday we follow instructions and uh the agent was going to the property at some point during that day so my customer was jogging past the house basically probably all day probably did about 30 k's that day just to track

You know, every person that was going through there by private inspection, what the agent was doing, their partner had sat at the open for inspection from 15 minutes before it to 15 minutes afterwards.

And, you know, of course, come to the assumption that there's no buyer interest, no serious buyer interest and that our offer is, you know, what they should take.

The Monday call or text message was along the lines of, the agent at the open home parks on the other side of the road, but they're parked in the driveway now, which signals to me that they're inside closing the owner on my offer. I'm like, this is a really great assumption.

And it's what buyers do often is that they get emotionally involved and they arrive at outcomes that are just, you know, fictitious. And they make these things up in their mind and they're playing with hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars and they're making these decisions with very clouded judgment.

And that, you know, preframes what they may do next. If that came back to a, you know, a negotiation where a stage two, they may have been influenced to pay more or whatever it might have been because they had made some assumption.

So I think really dangerous to do something that emotional buyers do consistently. But a funny one that I had last couple of weeks, my response to him on the text message was he's seen you jogging. He's talking to the vendor about jacking up the price because he knows you're emotionally invested. Yeah.

They weren't private investigators, these guys, were they?

A somewhat similar one is when I get a client comes to me, generally an evaluator at Negotiate, and so they've created a whole fiction in their head about any other buyers that are interested, their whole backstory is everything, and they reckon they know how the option is going to fly out. I'm like...

Can we put that aside? Let's just close the door on that. We're going to start from scratch and really work out what the real situation is. But it's so hilarious. Well, they won't be doing this because of that. And I'm like, oh, my God.

Like if we go to auction with your theories on how this thing is going to play out, we definitely – you'll either overpay or you won't pay. I mean, it's just not going to be good. But it's so funny how people get very invested and –

Crazy.

It did give me an idea, though.

Well, listen, Scott, it's been a fun chat.

I've got a little camera that I put in the backyard that's one of those night cameras and I just sort of take photos of the bandicoots and stuff. But that's not a bad little strategy, right?

You could just dump this in the front yard of the property, track everyone who looks at the property over 24 hours. You could. There's no issues with that, is there? So thanks, Scott, for signing on, mate. It was a good chat.

Please don't.

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