Why we can’t tell you what you should offer on a property.

Whenever you’re going to put in an offer on a property, especially your first home, but really any home at any time, the desire to know that you’re not paying too much is really really strong. If you love a property you don’t want to miss out, but you also don’t want to pay too much. We get it! 

Unfortunately even though a number of our team members are ex-real estate agents, we’re all dealing with sales and property all day long. We are never going to be able to give you guidance as to what you should pay for a property. What that property is worth is different to every person who will look at it based on their needs and desires.  In addition, we will often have multiple pre-approved clients offering on the same property – as such we wouldn’t ever disclose your information or anyone else’s by giving price guidance.

Ultimately, your offer will depend on your borrowing capacity, hopefully you’ve got a pre-approval in place that will give you some guidance as to what you can pay for a property, but that should never determine what a property is worth, only the ceiling for your comfort level or borrowing capacity. 

The best way to determine what a property is worth is to have us run some research on it (go ahead and email us the property address and we can do that at any time!). 

And what that will do is give you guidance about previous sales, other properties on the market, the sales history for that property, and you can use that as a guide to help you know what you should be paying for a property, based on comparable sales.

Remember, you should always take that sales history with a grain of salt! It’s generated by computer, and it’s not a real human being looking through that property and assessing it based on other properties out there in the marketplace (which is what a valuer will ultimately do). You need to look at comparable sales, but also on a gut feeling as to what this property is worth for you and your specific needs. 

We have also written another blog on what to do if you’re in a multiple offer situation which you should find very helpful to read:

https://www.uploans.com.au/blog/2017/01/11/multiple-offers-what-to-do-to-stand-out-in-a-crowd/