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Brendan Wong
A Queensland agency claims it is the first to successfully sell a residential property in Queensland using a reverse auction model.
NATGroup sold the Crestmead house last weekend after the owner agreed to go with a reverse auction, which saw the price of the property drop by $1,000 every weekday until it was sold or hit the reserve price.
The three-bedroom house eventually sold for $271,000, after the auction price started at $283,000.
NATGroup sales agent Claudia Escobar told Real Estate Business the reverse auction model was used to make the property stand out and generate interest in it.
“Everywhere, especially in Crestmead, we needed some sort of point of difference,” she said. “It’s something not everyone is doing.
“We had the phones ringing the whole time. The market is not one where we receive multiple offers, but we did. Everyone was keen because it was something different.”
Ms Escobar said it was the first property in Queensland to be sold via the unconventional method and also the first time NATGroup had utilised it.
She said she had just listed another property that would be sold using a reverse auction model.
“We are definitely looking for more vendors who are willing, especially vendors who have been on the market for a long time,” she said.
However, Ms Escobar admitted the method was not something that worked for everyone.
“The vendor definitely has to be willing to meet the market first. It needs to be for someone who’s willing to take the risk," she explained.
“At the end of the day, our job is to get the best possible price at the quickest possible time.”
Last year, a NSW southern highlands commercial property failed to sell successfully via a reverse auction model after the vendor refused to go lower than $1.5 million.
Winner of the Auctioneer of the Year award at the recent Australian Real Estate Awards, Damien Cooley, who conducted the NSW auction, said while a reverse auction was a point of difference, a traditional auction far outweighed its advantages.
“All the advantages of creating a competitive environment and letting the competition bid to a level against each other, the emotion of that competition will far outweigh any advantage of getting somebody to put their hand up before somebody else," he told Real Estate Business.
“It’s not to say there isn’t a place for reverse auctions in the market, but I think you need to be very selective of which type of property you do that on. For what we did, I feel that traditional auctions are much better.”
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