How long should your property be on the market for?
Residential
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Residential
That being said, regional residential homes have become hot property over the last couple of years. High demand is reducing sale times across the board, as you can see from the below data:
Region 2012-2016 average sale time (days) 2017 average sale time (days)
Waikato 150 61
Hawkes Bay 86 53
Manawatu-Whanganui 116 48
Wairarapa 121 47
West Coast 274 116
Canterbury 107 84
North Otago 143 46
People are loving the regions at the moment, but remember: these are just average times, and there are plenty of other factors that will adjust your expected time on the market.
If you want to reduce the length of your home sale without compromising on the price, there are a few things you can do. These are the factors you need to consider:
These factors are split into those you can control and those you can’t. You can work around the latter and get the right advice from your agent in regards to the former.
The more you want to get for your home (i.e. the higher above RV), the more patient you’ll need to be. You sometimes hear stories of people who received tens of thousands of dollars more than they expected in just a few days: but these examples are few and far between. Normally, you need to wait for the right buyer and the right level of marketing hype to build to achieve the sales price your property deserves.
The amount of renovation work that needs to be done to your home can, unexpectedly, either reduce or increase the amount of time your property spends on the market. If your market is full of people who are looking for a ‘project home’ i.e. one in need of refurbishment at a discount, and your property fulfills that criteria, it may be snapped up very quickly.
On the other hand, if your buyers want something they can move into straight away, you may be better off doing some minor renovations yourself to speed up the sale process.
At the heart of any good property sale is a good marketing campaign. A poor marketing campaign, or the wrong marketing campaign, can result in a dearth of buyers and a long time on the market. If you work with the right agent with the right local knowledge and expertise, however, and put aside enough to make the most of their talents, your property sale may be a lot faster than you first expected.
Hawkes Bay is a hot market with a low inventory and lots of demand. The West Coast, on the other hand, has a lot less demand. As you would expect, this results in properties in Hawkes Bay selling faster than those on the West Coast. But that doesn’t mean every property on the West Coast will take a long time to sell. If you can control the price, renovation and marketing factors well enough, you can offset the location factor. There are buyers in every market, as long as you sell to the right conditions.
Homes with unique features can either be very difficult or very easy to sell. For example, the average person may not be as interested in a home’s wine cellar (or at least not enough to pay more for it), while a wine professional or a vintner may be willing to make an offer to secure this useful, unique feature.
The same applies to less unusual features, such as a six- or seven-bedroom home. These can be ‘too much’ for many buyers, and as such can stretch out your sales time.
If people aren’t buying property, or rather can’t buy property, then you will have a longer sale time. This can be the result of a number of market conditions, such as high interest rates, a lack of financing or macroprudential rules cutting off the mortgage tap. This is possibly the most frustrating uncontrollable factor, as it relies on being ready to sell at the right time—that is, during a busy market peak.
How long should your property be on the market for? On average, one to two months. But average times only work for average properties, and there are many other factors that will affect your home come sale time. Take control of the price, the renovation work and the marketing, and work around the location, the unique features and the market conditions: this is how you achieve a timely and profitable property sale.
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