Frequently Asked
Questions

When you create a beautiful product, thoroughly market it to all of the active potential buyers, and host an open home event that creates a highly emotional and competitive environment, you will receive the most honest survey of the market’s opinion of the value of your home.

We call this the Race To The Top approach. It is a process designed to find the real market value as fast as possible, where the competition is then managed upwards without limiting the upside final price.

These are the five steps we never shortcut…

1. Prepare … rejuvenate your home before you do anything else. If you don’t know where to start, we provide trade resources and complementary advice.
2. Present … stage and style your home to optimise its actual feel and function. We never use emotion-killers like virtual staging. Our world-class, in-house styling is uniquely included as part of our selling service.
3. Promote … high-calibre photography combined with high-tech digital promotion to attract more buyers than anything else.
4. Price Guidance … dynamic price guidance that attracts the right buyers and allows them to revise and refine their offers, without the impediments of price anchors or ceilings.
5. Perception Management … the right negotiation strategies combined with the right technology to optimise the perception of competition, urgency and value.

• Interpretation of buyer interest data to find the market value within the early-phase optimal selling window.
• Specific emotional negotiation techniques such as urgency scripts and FOMO dialogue.
• Price Zone Pitching to unlock larger numbers of offers and ensure offers are not inhibited by any ‘price anchor’ or ‘price ceiling’.
• An online offer management system (transparent or non-transparent as required) that allows every buyer to revise their price and conditions as we ‘race to the top’. Buyers experience the impact of the competitive environment whether the competition is merely perceived or real. This significantly lowers the time and financial risks of any residential property sale.
• Cutting-edge technology to manage urgency and offer transparency in a way that is incredibly user-friendly to all buyers.

You should never start any campaign with a price. We always start every campaign with a FOR SALE price. Pricing limits your final price. It either places an anchor or a ceiling on it.

If you want to control the price outcome, you simply cannot start your campaign with a ‘price guess’ based on theoretical comparable sales. Setting an asking price is actually a high-risk approach.

Un-priced properties do not deter buyer enquiry if the home is attractively presented and marketed. Agents who believe you need an advertised price to attract more buyers have little to no experience with high-calibre, well-presented homes. We have historically had more attendance at our first open homes than most of the agents we know … and we have never commenced a campaign with an asking price.

Although we do not advertise a price for our homes, we always provide buyers with price guidance when they enquire. There are specific reasons for this which we are happy to discuss.

Presentation is everything.

Our unique Australian Home Staging Study (available on our website) details how high-calibre property styling consistently increases the value of almost any home by approximately 5% to 15% on average.

We always provide no-obligation preparation and presentation advice … in addition to our award-winning styling … for all of our clients prior to listing. In addition to how presentation adds value, it is the process an agent uses that determines whether or not you sell for an above-market price.

Yes. Every property needs staging and styling. We provide the lowest-cost, highest-calibre styling service in all of Greater Brisbane.

We have won more than 12 Major Queensland HIA Property Styling Awards over the past 10 years … along with the International Home Stager of the Year Award in 2020 … and our experience in this area is second to none.

Property Styling is the single most important item in terms of raising the perceived value of your home. It sells the dream and shows buyers how the property can feel and function.

While it is important to market to interstate and international buyers, it is important to realise that 95% of all buyers will come from one to two suburbs away from your home.

We use online marketing strategies … including the latest AI online marketing tools … to attract all manner of active buyers. This includes every major portal and one of the largest social media followings of any real estate agent in Brisbane, with approximately 40,000 warm and real followers across multiple Instagram and Facebook accounts.

We do not waste money on marketing gimmicks that do not add value. We only use what works, not what ‘looks nice’.

We generally require a minimum of 4 weeks to prepare all of the marketing and staging requirements … furniture selections, booking of external suppliers, allocation of installation date.

In the event you need to rejuvenate your home, the lead time may be longer depending on the trades and work required.

This is a big topic. Auctions are a high-risk strategy … and so is the traditional private treaty method. Auctions represent a high time and financial risk, and there are much safer ways of achieving the same or better results.

Three reasons we never use public auction…

1. Auctions limit competition … only cash or unconditional buyers can bid.
2. The highest bid ends up being anchored to the second-highest bid. There is very little price difference between the highest and second-highest bid at the end. A non-transparent process, by contrast, often achieves a massive gap between the two.
3. Auctions place control into the buyers’ hands due to the high level of total transparency.

We use a hybrid approach … the best of private treaty and the best of auction.

We optimise the best of private treaty selling and public auctions, which provides consistently high sales results whether or not there is just one outlier emotional buyer or many emotional buyers. Auctions are dead in the water if there is just one emotional buyer or just one bidder.

We also use an online offer management system that complements our negotiation approach … allowing us to be as transparent or non-transparent as we like, depending on what the campaign requires. Public auctions and sub-optimal private treaty methodologies simply lose this element of control.

We are proud to say that we have led the entire Brisbane market for almost 10 years in this respect.

Average days on market is the most important performance metric available. It is the only way you can tell if an agent has consistent high performance.

High volume of listings and sales tells you nothing. If an agent lists 200 homes but sells just 100, many sellers are led to believe the agent is a high performer. But listing 200 homes and selling 100 is a 50% failure rate … and it tells you nothing about whether the agent achieved consistently high prices.

When an agent sells at a consistently fast rate, it indicates the agent sells for consistently high prices. Why? Because sellers do not take fast or early offers if the price isn’t great.

In our experience, a home such as yours, in your location, should sell within the first 7 to 14 days.

We have historically attracted 2 to 4 times more buyers than local market averages.

Live case studies and buyer-interest graphs are available at capecodresidential.com.au/case-studies-transformations.

Our fees are made up of three core components… Marketing, Staging and Commission. It is a packaged deal.

In short, we offer a low-cost, high-performance marketing and staging package to suit each home. We do not require payment of any cost until settlement either.

Once we have fully audited a home and discovered exactly what it needs (in terms of staging and styling), we can then provide a package of costs that is always lower than our competitors for the equivalent service.

This depends on a home inspection. However, if your home requires rejuvenation, it is not uncommon to spend between 3% and 5% of the value of your home attending to the critical items that determine how your home feels, and how your home functions, from a buyer’s point of view.

Rest assured, any amount you spend on rejuvenation will either dramatically increase the value of your home (by at least the amount you have spent) or ensure that you do not lose a significant amount of money … which is often the case when critical rejuvenation items are left unattended.

The six major areas of rejuvenation…

• Paint
• Floor coverings … carpet, timber or otherwise
• Kitchen
• Bathrooms
• Gardens & external appeal … carports, fences, pathways, decks
• Cleaning & de-cluttering

We offer a service and performance package unlike any other agency in Brisbane.

We are Australia’s most awarded agency for home presentation … with a sales track record to match.

We strictly limit our listings each year to ensure a higher performance and service outcome … an approach completely at odds to traditional local agents.

We are also Brisbane’s only all-inclusive Staging, Styling & Selling real estate agency, with the fastest times on market in Greater Brisbane across more than 75 suburbs, including yours. This is independently illustrated in Australia’s only home staging study … a publication we produced in association with the Interior Design Association.

We also know your area well, having previously secured outstanding above-market sales results we would be happy to discuss with you.