Every agent in Brisbane sells you the same thing. Local knowledge. An office on your street. A name on the bus stop and a face on the back of a park bench. The pitch is always that the agent who lives and breathes your suburb is the one who will get you the best result.
Over the past 12 years we have thoroughly challenged that idea, but it was last year’s results truly ‘sealing the deal’.
Across 9 different suburbs, one after another, we set 9 suburb records where we had no local office in any one of those suburbs.
Sit with that for a moment. The one thing every local agent insists you cannot win without … a local presence … we did without, 9 times in a row, across 9 separate markets, where our average time to sell across those records was 5 days.
This is far from just a lucky run.
Our homes have sold in an average of 8 days for 12 years straight, across more than 85 suburbs, which has made us the market leader in Greater Brisbane for all of these years.
For the last 5 years that average has dropped to 5 days.
These are not figures we have cherry-picked from a good month. They are sustained, public, and they hold across dozens of suburbs every year.
So what is actually going on here, if not local knowledge?
The honest answer is that local knowledge used to be a genuine advantage and no longer is. Knowing what sold, and for how much, was once closely held information. Today every buyer and seller can see every recent sale on any street in 30 seconds. However, the skillset that has not accompanied local agents as the years went by is the ability to bring more buyers to a home and have them compete for it.
That is the part we have spent twelve years getting right. More buyers, every single listing.
Our beautifully presented homes pull 2 to 4 times the buyer enquiry versus the local average, and we convert that enquiry into competition through the use of fully optimised online promotion and fully optimsed perception management.
And while our market leading presentation abilities consistently increase the appeal of every home we sell, our presentation skillset is not the solitary driver of a faster sale and a higher price. It is, however, the engine that produces the competition, and it is the competition that lifts the final price.
None of that depends on where our office sits. Our 9 records in a row prove it.
So if you are choosing an agent, it is worth asking the local one a simple question. How many new price benchmarks did you set last year in suburbs that you do not normally work in? The answer tells you whether you are buying genuine performance or just proximity.
If you would like to see how your own suburb actually performs … real days on market, how often homes there are discounted before they sell, and how that compares to our record … that is exactly the conversation we are happy to have.
