I have been working in the industry for quite a few decades.  I look back now and I am so grateful that I started with George Hadgelias at Ray White Paddington because it was there that I learnt a lot about the importance of mindset and how that can and will have a dramatic impact on a person’s success.

A new person to real estate is a precious and valuable asset because they don’t know what they don’t know.  That is a blessing!  It is only over time that they get experience and can make decisions about what real buyers look like, how a motivated seller talks and what works and doesn’t work in ‘this market’.   I am being facetious!

When I started with George, it was a given in the office that selling by auction was the norm.  I saw it working and I saw the impact it had on the agents income, the business and how George could so accurately predict the months results so far in advance because of the relatively high success rate of sale by auction.

I attended the Ray White training that was heavily focused on auction.  So yes I was fully immersed.   Despite that, it still was not easy to continually list auctions because there was a lot of resistance from the market which was fuelled by some negative input from agents who were not using auction as a method of sale and opposition from sellers to the concept of paying for marketing.  The internet was about to hit but at that point the newspaper was king.

As time went on – and I moved on – I joined the corporate team and saw everything so differently.  Some agencies and agents did not have, what I call, an auction culture.   That is where I first started to hear ‘auctions don’t work here’.

First I tried to fight it by trying to convince the salespeople that it was a method of sale  – just like multi-list, open listing, sole agency or tender.   That there is a process and if you follow the process you are more likely to achieve a sale because of the high success rate if you took into consideration the 3 stages.

Through that experience I came to the realisation that it is not the auction that fails, it is not the market, the property or the seller.  It is the agent, the agent’s belief in the process, willingness to follow that process and the agents mindset.

Here are 4 Real Estate Truths:

•        Every seller wants top dollar

•        Every buyer wants a bargain

•        The only thing stopping a sale is the price

•        There is no ideal auction property or market

A team member I had in one of our offices on the Northside some years ago once said – ‘There is a buyer for every property, it just comes down to getting the price right”.  How you get there will be your decision!

At the end of the day it will be the agent who determines if they will have an auction business or not.