BUYER AGENT BENEFITS: Buying a property is not as simple as we imagine when we fantasize about owning our own little patch of terra firma. In our heads, we are simply saving for a deposit and balancing our budget to ensure that we can afford the mortgage repayments. Simple!
If only. Somewhere along the journey, someone will introduce you to a little thing called stamp duty! Your face falls as you realise that you’ve lost the tens of thousands of dollars. You were saving as a little buffer (or perhaps you had your eyes on renovating the kitchen first thing). The cost adds up.
Here the Decision Comes
Then you decide that you’d like a detailed strata report for the unit block. You’re paying a couple of hundred dollars for that. Perhaps you’d like a builder to inspect the foundations of the house you’ve got your eye on. You can’t put a price on peace of mind. The costs, meanwhile, are continuing to go up.
Finally, your offer is accepted. It’s been a costly journey (not to mention all the hours you spent not working, and attending open houses every Saturday for the past few months). Then someone hits you with the conveyancing fees. Given that you’ve just forked out a deposit you’ve been saving for years, and you’re locking yourself into decades of debt, this late cost feels like kicking a man while he is down.
You would be well justified in asking yourself, ‘why would I want to pay for a buyers agent?’ It has been a costly exercise up until this point, and adding something else into the mix feels like self flagellation.
What most people fail to realise is that there is a cost to not employing a buyers agent. It is not a cost that can be quantified in dollars and cents. It is not quantitative, it is qualitative. The true cost of not employing a buyers agent is that you might go through this whole process, forking out a million dollars, and it might be the wrong house for you.
You might find yourself regretting your purchase in years to come, wondering why no one told you about the bad reputation of the suburb, or the fact that termites had obliterated the foundations of the living room.
Fact:
The simple fact is that in the process of buying a property, no one is actually on your side. The buyer is looking primarily at the sale price, and the estate agent is thinking about their commission – the two of these are linked. It’s two against one. It might not be until too late that you realise you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes.
In that moment, the cost of not hiring a buyers agent dwarfs the deposit or the repayments. You know that had you done things differently, you might have found yourself in the right home. For the sake of hiring one professional all those years ago, your life could have gone in an entirely different direction.
There is a cost either way. In our experience, the cost of hiring an expert who is firmly in your corner is a drop in the ocean when you consider how long you will hold onto that property.
You just need to decide which cost you are happy to pay…
