Auckland Apartment Sales - Who Gets More Real Estate Agent or Agency?

Apartment Specialists Podcast No: 13

Summary:

In this podcast, I'll be discussing the reasons why most apartment owners lose thousands of dollars when they sell their apartment. Find out how you can avoid this situation and get the value you deserve. Learn all the essential strategies for any Auckland apartment sales.

TRANSCRIPTION: Andrew Murray, Apartment Specialists. Here is another reason why apartment owners lose thousands of dollars when selling their Auckland apartment.

Is it the agent or the agency who gets paid the most for your Auckland apartment sale? As an agent myself, I obviously know what the answer to this question is, however I wanted to know what the owners think. I rang about 20 different apartment owners and discussed their apartments and their plans for the future. I also asked them all this question: When selling your apartment, what's more important - is it the agent or is it the agency? Every single owner said it’s the agent. Which is interesting because agencies invest so much money into their branding and their advertising, yet every owner I spoke to stated that the agent is the key thing for them.

There are multiple reasons for that. If you see the data, it’s usually the same agents that get the highest prices. Yes, agents can be lucky with some sales occasionally, but it tends to repeat itself in terms of who gets the highest prices. In addition, the average wage of a real-estate agent is under $35-40,000 a year – although realistically - I'd say it's more like 50 or 60,000, but those are official statistics - which means probably about 5 to 10% of all the agents are selling all the listings. So quite simply this indicates that the agent is more crucial than the agency when looking to get the highest price for your apartment.

How do you find out if an agent is the best person to represent you? Being a top agent in this industry is determined by how much commission the agent earns, not by the prices they achieve. In the housing market it's very challenging to tell because there are so many differences in houses, they aren't comparable. You can have houses in the same street, but how are you able to know the values, because they're all different. One has a pool, one doesn't. This one's got a deck, etc, etc. But in an apartment building - you've got various apartments in the CBD, over 18,000 apartments – however they're very comparable. Because of this you can quite easily tell which agent is getting the highest prices.

This means when you're dealing with your Auckland Apartment agent, you need to ask them if you can see their latest sales and how they achieved them. This will give you a very clear idea of how good that agent is, and how determined they are in getting the best result for the vendor or commission in their pocket.

This is one of the biggest and the most unnoticed things in this type of industry. I'll say it again, the best agents are assessed in this market by how much commission they earn, not by the sale prices they obtain. Therefore, as an owner you really need to be aware of this when choosing your agent and ask for proof showing the prices they achieve. I hope that this helps.