Best strategies for buying a house: Agents reveal the desperate tactics that work – and those that don’t

If you’re thinking of buying a bottle of champagne for your real estate agent or delivering a love letter to a vendor about their beautiful house in a bid to persuade them to sell you a property – stop there!

The message from some of the country’s leading real estate agents is that such tactics are a waste of your time and money, and theirs.

It follows Domain research that found hopeful buyers are resorting to a number of desperate ploys in order to secure the home of their dreams, like buying slabs of beer and other drinks for their agents and vendors, offering to pay the seller’s moving costs and writing them pleading letters.

“The only thing that guarantees you’ll be successful is if you’re the last person at the auction with your hand up,” said Danny Cobden, director of agency CobdenHayson. “In reality, no other tactic can win you that home, however much you want it.

“We have a duty to our clients, the vendors, to do the best job possible for them and that’s always first and foremost in our minds.

“There’s no way we’d be swayed from that by being offered gifts, or that vendors will either. At the end of the day, money talks!”

The survey of Domain buyers over the past 12 months discovered that many had used a series of different strategies in a bid to outwit rival buyers and claim their prized property.

These included giving gifts of alcohol and home-made baked goods to agents and vendors, writing letters, lying to other buyers that neighbours played loud music at night, and dressing smartly to pretend they had more money to spend than they, in fact, had.

But none of those have ever impressed agent Leanne Pilkington, chief executive of Laing+Simmons and former president of the Real Estate Institute of NSW. 

“Agents are legally obliged to get the best price for their vendors,” she said. “Of course, you want to help buyers buy the house of their dreams but you have to do the right thing by the vendor.

“There are much more sensible things buyers can do to give themselves a better chance of buying, however. It’s not always about the money. For instance, they might be flexible about settlement periods if the vendor wants an earlier, or later, settlement.”

Similarly, buyers should be open to the sellers’ wishes. 

Pilkington says sometimes vendors might want to leave some of the fixtures and fittings – like a pool table – in situ rather than go to the trouble of moving them, so purchasers might show that they’re open to that to win favour.

As for buyers proclaiming loudly at an open for inspection that they know there’s a problem with the neighbours, she says most people are wise to such tactics. 

“When someone does that, we all simply know that they’re very keen on the property,” she said. “And an agent, in that position, will simply make that point.”

McGrath national manager of sales Troy Malcolm would similarly be unimpressed. He says transparency and integrity are of vital importance, and there are rules about agents accepting gifts.

“Things like that don’t help at all,” he said. “We need to get the premium price for our client, and so it’s up to the buyer to put their best foot forward on the day instead. 

“The best way for them to be successful is if they make sure all their finances are in order before they try to buy, they know their limits and they have all their building, pest and strata inspection reports done.

“That way, they know exactly how much they can afford, and how much they might have to spend, and they should make sure the agent knows they’re serious about bidding so they’re not overlooked on the day.”

Even dressing to impress isn’t a smart move, Cobden says. He’s met plenty of extremely wealthy people in his time in real estate who might turn up to homes for sale looking so scruffy, you’d be forgiven they didn’t have a spare dollar to their name.

The only ploy that, occasionally, has been known to help, those agents agree, is those letters to vendors saying that the buyer loves their home and plans to treasure it for their own family.

If a vendor is particularly emotionally attached to their home, then it might make the difference between two prospective purchasers stuck on the same private-treaty price.

“There’s nothing wrong with trying that,” Pilkington said. “So go for it. Give it a try. But most vendors will still prefer to sell for the highest price possible.”

Malcolm concurred and said some vendors could be very emotional about their homes.

“It might have been a family home through different generations of their family, and they’d like to have the reassurance it’ll continue to be a family home rather than demolished by a developer,“ he said.

On the other hand, however, no one knows if the buyer is being truthful or if their plans won’t change. 

There would be nothing to stop them, after they’d successfully bought, from deciding to knock down and rebuild after all, or extending beyond recognition to accommodate new, or unexpected, arrivals.