From panic to plan: Guiding sellers through emotional roadblocks

With owners often raising doubts about the property’s pricing and the timing of the sale, Monte and Lucas said it was up to agents to provide relevant data and information to ease their concerns.

Del Monte also said sellers often hesitated to trust agents, suggesting property professionals should maintain consistent communication to build owners’ confidence.

“It’s all about trying to make them feel as comfortable, and part of the decision-making process around strategy, around timing,” Lucas told REB.

According to Lucas, sellers were mainly concerned about price and timing, but he noted it’s difficult to give precise advice as no one can accurately predict the best moment to sell.

“It’s all about trying to give your owners that confidence of, firstly, who are the buyers that are going to be coming through your property? Who wants to buy it? Who are you targeting?”

Lucas said agents can also help owners overcome their fears by showing them comparable properties in the market.

“You would try and engage them to say, let’s follow this house together, this one’s the market right now, it’s very similar to yours, or the same buyers looking at it.”

To build confidence, Lucas said agents can even suggest that sellers wait until more comparable properties sell, then choose to market their own campaign.

“You don’t want to push them to put on the market if it’s not strong right now, or there is some hesitation in the marketplace.”

Similarly, Del Monte said that, given agents were working for the vendors, it was their role to provide all the information and data that would aid them in the selling process.

“Our job is to work for the owners, and in order to work for the owners, you have to give them every bit of information, every ounce of information, what the risk could be, etc.”

“We have to inform the owner of what’s happening at the time that they’re on the market, even before they go to market.”

According to Del Monte, agents can also encourage vendors to conduct their own research on the market, pricing, and similar properties.

“They have to go on realestate.com.au, look at what’s recently sold, what’s comparable to theirs from an objective point of view and not an optimistic one, and work out what the value of their home really is themselves.”

He said another common fear of sellers was choosing the right agent to work with, including whether the agent was being upfront about pricing and whether their opinions could be trusted.

“Is the agent I’m choosing telling me what I want to hear, or are they being honest with the job that they intend to do?”

Del Monte said that in situations where owners were given differing prices, honest agents sometimes lost listings because they hadn’t told sellers what they wanted to hear.

“If you’ve got one agent telling you a figure that’s far below two other agents, you’d think because the other two are telling you a higher price, maybe the higher price is the truth.”

He said that many vendors’ fears around the agent’s motives were due to a lack of communication from the agents about the selling process.

“They call it once a week and say, ‘oh, we had 10 inquiries, we had five people walk through the open home’.”

“They give them no specifics around the actual buyers. And so then, of course, the owner’s going to second-guess the situation. They don’t have all the information.”

Because of this, Del Monte said that sharing all relevant information was critical for agents to build trust with sellers.

“We’ll meet with our owners every week with the full breakdown of what buyers have come through, who they are, what their family set up is, what their personal circumstances are, what their urgency is to buy if they made an offer, good, bad,” he concluded.