We love property at Brickfloor. So much so, that we spend all day gathering and analysing property data to enable us to present market offers to our customers. When we aren’t busy building our property data models, we are speaking with customers directly to learn everything about their home and what makes it special to them.
Part of our standard process is to complete a detailed phone call to learn about your home and obtain photos of your place. We feel that a direct conversation, viewing up-to-date photos and using available property data enables us to have a thorough view of a home prior to our full inspection. This process allows for greater offer accuracy as we aren’t relying on potentially outdated or non-specific information available online or standard automated models. Automated models alone generally provide quite a wide price range, whereas Brickfloor will provide a substantiated (and guaranteed) single offer amount for a customer’s home.
What do you look at?
A common question that we get asked is: what exactly do you take into account? There is quite a list of attributes that need to be accounted for when it comes time to providing a market offer on a property. Significant attributes are location, land size and dwelling features/quality. Additional factors will include things like outdoor areas (pool, alfresco, outdoor kitchen, deck etc), landscaping, car parking options, orientation (eg. north-facing), zoning, land shape and dimensions (regular/irregular, smaller or large frontage) etc.
Location is a large driver of value and the market will pay a relative premium for suburbs/areas that enjoy good proximity to the city centre, transport options, lifestyle factors (eg. beach), desirable school zones, quiet positions and good general conveniences. Home position can also include potential negatives such as being close to a freeway or railway line, on a busy road, near non-residential (industrial/commercial use) properties, or opposite a cemetery.
Land size plays a significant part in value too. The larger the parcel of land, generally, the more flexibility a property will have for things such as extensions, additional outdoor features (pool, alfresco, tennis court) and even future redevelopment subject to zoning requirements.
The dwelling itself is also influential. Australia enjoys such varied properties throughout our cities and styles can include early period (Victorian, Californian Bungalow, Edwardian, Federation), to post-war conventional, to ultra-modern architecturally designed homes – sometimes all in the one street! Add in villa units, townhouses, apartments, lifestyle properties etc and there is plenty to pay attention to. For each customer’s property, we will note style, age, condition, fit-out, features, living area size, age of any renovations, any defects etc.
Special features don’t always impact our offer. We want to make sure we capture all the home features, however, not all features will add value when looking through the lens of the open market. For example, feature walls or painting in tones outside of what is expected by the market might be to your taste, but often won’t add value to your home.
Comparing sales
Once we’ve learnt about the subject home and the various features, the best place to start our offer assessment is to compare the home against similar homes in the area. Recent sales and market trends are a robust way to see where a particular home is placed against inferior, similar and superior properties. We will manually compare all of the various home attributes and generally there will be a number of positive and negative aspects in relation to the sales. For example, a sale may have a larger allotment, inferior presentation, more bedrooms etc. All of these various positive and negative attributes are considered in our assessment process.
There is an inherent limitation when searching for sales as there may not be the most ideal sales evidence available at the time of assessment. The dream scenario is to have an identical home with identical features, next door to the customer and sold a week prior to us providing an offer! Dream scenarios are few and far between so we use the best sales evidence available at the time of assessment. Sometimes that means casting the sales net wider geographically and going a bit further back in time to obtain the most ideal evidence.
Potentially, a customer can return to us months later once new sales take place in the market. An offer figure may change if there is evidence to support a move from our original offer – it could be an increase or decrease depending on what the sales/market is indicating.
The ultimate indicator of value
It’s important to note that putting a home on the open market is the best test of what a home is worth at a point in time. After a decent marketing period through a reputable local agent for the area, a property is effectively worth what someone is prepared to pay for it on the day. Prior to listing , Brickfloor can provide a competitive offer in relation to the best evidence that we have at the time. We’ll share three of the most ideal sales in relation to the customer’s home in our Brickfloor offer document which provides transparency and demonstrates why we feel our offer is competitive.
A great feature of the Market Price Guarantee is the chance to achieve a higher offer than our figure. We show why our offer is competitive in our documentation, but should you want more, you get the opportunity to go to market and see if you can get a higher price. We see both outcomes, that is, where homes don’t achieve higher offers and Brickfloor has purchased these properties, and homes that do receive better offers from the market and sell for more. To date we have seen more instances of homes being acquired by Brickfloor which is a testament to our competitive pricing.
Our Market Price Guarantee is a well researched and substantiated offer figure that effectively provides an ‘insurance’ for the sale process.. Anyone who takes up a Brickfloor Market Price Guarantee has a competitive offer in hand to start with and certainty that the sale outcome is going to be at this amount, or above!
