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Opening up how to negotiate a sale with Peter Clements
With Peter Clements Openn Negotiation
Peter Clements has had an amazing year. In 2017, he took home the trophy for Residential Salesperson of the Year for WA and Mint Real Estate Claremont was named the best small agency in Australia. Peter’s statistics are impressive. Mint set new ‘highest price’ records on six streets. The average time on market was just 16 days (Perth average is 69 days). Further, Peter and his team generated on average four offers for every listing and they negotiated an average uplift of $171,159 (around 20%) on initial offers.
Finally, 86% of listings were repeat or referred clients. Incredible results – and all in tough market conditions.
"Openn Negotiation has totally changed everything for me because it's allowed me to pick the best things out of all of the other methods."
The GFC brutalised Western Australia. Peter says, “The tumble came in 2008. We changed our tune, we changed the way we talked to buyers.” By 2010, the market came back a little bit in Perth, and it's been a rollercoaster ride ever since. He says, “We're starting to see a few green shoots, but very, very much on a knife edge. If there's any negative press that comes out in the Perth market, it'll actually change the way that people look at real estate. We're sitting with quite high stock levels still, particularly out in the mortgage belt, and there's quite a lot of mortgage stress out there too, so really it's an interesting market."
Peter credits his outstanding success to a new method of selling, which he calls Openn Negotiation.
He says, “Openn Negotiation has totally changed everything for me because it's allowed me to pick the best things out of all of the other methods. It allows the competition of an auction without having to have the restriction on terms. It has the ease of normal private treaty, because buyers can actually put in their own terms and conditions, and as long as the owner is happy with those terms and conditions, then that buyer can participate in an online competition."
When a buyer walks through a home, Peter explains he will say, “’Just come on through. Have a look through the property. If you got any questions about the home, or the process that we're selling it under, which is open negotiation, please let me know’. Nine times out of ten, they will say, ‘So, yeah. Tell me about how this process works’. To them, I'll say, and generally very loudly so everybody can hear, I'll say, ‘Listen Lee, if you go to most home opens around here if they're selling by private treaty, they'll tell you to put in your best and final offer, and you'll have no idea what to pay. You can potentially miss out on your dream home by a few thousand dollars. With Open Negotiation, that simply cannot happen because if you put in a price on the App that you're happy with, it doesn't have to be your best price’."
So if a buyer agrees to the open negotiation process, Peter will sit down with that buyer and he will ask them to put their price in the App. He says, “Once they've done that, we'll sit down and we'll do some paper work. That paperwork will discover the buyer’s deposit and if the buyer wants to put in a building or a wide-end inspection on the property as well. Once the owner signs off on that, and the buyer signs off on that, the buyer will be accepted onto the App, and then we can't sell the property to another buyer without the first buyer knowing exactly what price they need to beat."
He adds, “Owners now can see how many buyers they've got that have been qualified, and have filled in all of the legal paper work. Should one of those buyers withdraw because the price is coming up over the course of weeks, it has an effect on the seller. It makes them start to be more realistic in the marketplace. Certainly in Perth that's a toughie."
As the Openn Negotiation process is professional and transparent, Peter has noticed, “I'm getting referrals not only from the sellers who are over the moon happy, but buyers are starting to recommend me to other sellers, or actually wanting to use me themselves because they've been through the method. These aren't the buyers that won in the Openn Negotiation or got the property; these are the buyers that missed out! Buyers that missed out with Openn Negotiation are much like buyers at auctions. They know that they've actually participated in a transparent and open field."
Peter has found that this method has meant that properties sell faster too. He says, “That's the part that really excites me about what I'm doing at the moment. I get full fees. People don't argue about fees, you know. I charge on average two and a half per cent plus GST. I can't keep up with the stock levels. So 86% of my business comes from referrals, and that comes from happy buyers, happy sellers."
Openn Negotiation also takes a degree of anxiety away from the auction process. Peter says, “We set it up for a time. So let's say it starts at six o'clock on a Wednesday night. A buyer will be sitting at home in the comfort of their own home without any stress. The owners will be sitting with me in the office ready to sign off on the winning buyer’s price, and every time someone makes a bid, the clock restarts and gives a buyer another two minutes to bid against them, which will give buyers enough time to comfortably talk, and decide whether they want to keep going."
Peter says, “It's the most beautiful thing. Not only for the owner but the buyer too. The buyer knows because they've signed the contract that when they're that winning bidder, they'll actually own the property. Now there's no cooling off period in any of the states using Openn Negotiation. That's one of the beauties of this. The other thing is we know how many buyers there are throughout the whole process. The most I've had is 11 buyers registered prior to it actually starting."
A win, win, win process for the seller, buyer and agent. Who would have thought?
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