cornerofsilence

Has anyone brought a property here in New Zealand at auction?

Do you feel you got a good deal? Or do you feel they push the price up?

Why do so many properties go to auction rather than being sold on the open market? It just a sales ruse?

ex geordie

The house we bought was up for auction but we put in an offer before auction and they accepted so dont let the word auction put you off looking at houses

extrameant

I think you could find that auctions are the biggest real estate con going. The auctioneer is the 'chief' real estate guy of a pyramid of salesmen and gets $1000~1500 just for turning up for the 15 minutes.

Most salesmen with less than 2 years experience get very little and don't last more than 2 years. If a new guy lists a house, the established ones take most of the commission. These older guys pray off their earnings, and the houses they bring to market. With the continual turnover of hopefuls, its only a few lucky (greedy?) ones that make money out of it, but it seems just like pyramid selling to me.

You can guess what the auction costs the seller. Makes a cynical person think that there might be a reason for the hard sell for the owner to go to auction, other than it gets the seller the best price.

I've been to many local auctions, to suss prices locally, and it seems it's usually just one buyer (even that is less than 50% of the time in my experience, more often than not the house won't sell), occasionally two, but never a serious bidding war that I've seen.

There has been quite a lot in the press about how few actually sell at auction and what's the value to the seller of an auction. I would suggest its up to you to put pressure on the seller before auction, if you really like it, say you have an alternative and can't wait for the auction to decide. The seller will certainly feel the pressure.

There is an alternative viewpoint about how wonderful estate agents are, that I will be very surprised if someone doesn't put forward.