By Wendy Peterman, Petermans Estate Agents
I've been around long enough to remember when you could sell a house with a handwritten card in the newsagent's window – let alone a Polaroid image of the property glue-sticked onto an A4 printout from the office Cannon.
I joined Petermans, our 60-year old family business, in 2004, but before that, I had spent thirty-five years building a career in advertising, sixteen of those with Saatchi and Saatchi. It was early in that first career that I learned something that has served me every single day of my estate agency career: buyer motivation is everything.
You can have the cleverest campaign in the world, but if the person on the other side of it has no real reason to act, nothing happens. The same is absolutely true of selling your home.
Let me be direct – because too few agents are. When you receive multiple offers on your property, the instinct – an entirely natural one – is to go with the highest figure on the table.
More money in your pocket. That’s got to be the right choice – no?
Except it isn't always that simple, and I've watched sellers learn this the hard way more times than I care to count.
The buyer who offers you the most money is not always the buyer you want.
This is what I've seen happen, again and again. A seller accepts what sounds like ‘the best’ offer, but it is from someone who doesn't particularly need to move. Perhaps they've spotted an opportunity, perhaps they're trading up a little speculatively, perhaps they fell in love with your kitchen on a sunny Friday afternoon and made a hefty offer on the back of that feeling. Or maybe it was simply because they were told ‘someone else was interested’, and they offered what they needed to purely to stop someone else now, and think about it later. Vindictiveness is not a rare event. Or let’s be generous and say it was ‘misguided worry’.
A few weeks later, however, whatever feeling that drove them at the time has cooled. Their circumstances haven't changed – it is just that they were comfortable where they were before, and they're still feeling comfortable now. They start to find reasons to chip away at the price. Or they go concerningly quiet. Or they simply withdraw.
Meanwhile, the buyer that was turned down – the one who offered slightly less – has already had an offer accepted a few minutes away and are too far into the process to jump ship.
Why have they moved so much quicker? Because they have a job starting in a month, three stops down the line. They have two children who need to be in school uniform by September. They had every reason in the world to make this happen, and they were going to move mountains to make sure they did – and they are.
That is the sort of buyer you want. Motivation is what moves people. In my advertising days, we called it purchase intent, or a buying trigger – the thing that actually gets someone off the sofa.
A vague desire to upsize is not purchase intent – it is just plausible wishfulness. A job start date, on the other hand? A school admissions deadline. A lease expiring, and then they’re homeless...
These are the type of buyers who are genuinely propelled forward, and that propulsion is worth more than people credit.
What does it look like in practice? The motivated buyer is the sort that stays on top of their mortgage broker without being chased. They return signed documents the next working day, not the following week (or, indeed, the week after). They respond to their solicitor's emails the same afternoon. They want this done, and so they behave like people who want it done. I cannot tell you how much friction this removes from a transaction. It truly can be the difference between a sale that completes and one that drifts, stalls, renegotiates, or sometimes collapses.
In this market – where properties are moving, yes, but where there absolutely are certain chips stacked against us – security of purchaser really does matter.
We are not in the frenzied conditions of a few years ago. Buyers have more choice, more negotiating room, more time to think. And that means the unmotivated buyer has more opportunity to reconsider. That risk sits squarely on your shoulders as the seller.
There is also the matter of timeline. Conveyancing in the UK is currently taking, on average, around 16-17 weeks from offer to completion. That is four months of your life during which anything can happen. Interest and mortgage rates may change for the worse. Surveys can always throw up surprises. Solicitors might take a holiday and leave a locum to oversee queries, but not to execute any decisions.
If your buyer has no fire under them, no date by which they need to be moved, every small obstacle can become a reason to slow down. If your buyer has children starting school in three months, every small obstacle becomes something to solve by Wednesday.
This is why, at Petermans, we take our relationships with buyers seriously. They are not just names on a database; they are people we get to know. We understand what drives them, what they're looking for, and crucially what would genuinely change their lives.
So when a property comes to market around the corner from Judith Kerr, we know which particular family to call. The one for whom this factor is top of the very top of their wish list.
Technically, our client is the seller. But an estate agent who ignores buyers is a bit like an advertising agency that ignores the consumer. You can produce the most beautiful campaign, but if nobody's listening, nothing sells. The better we know our buyers, the better we serve our sellers.
So next time you come to sell your home, if you do find yourself in the position of looking at a spread of offers, my sincere advice is to look beyond simply the number at the top of the offer sheet.
Ask who these people are. Ask what's driving them. Ask your agent what they know about each of these buyers as human beings with real lives and real timelines. If that agent is us, we’ll have already told you!
The sale to the buyer giving the highest offer, but a buyer with no real need to move, might be the sale that never happens at all. A slightly lower offer from someone for whom the property ticks all boxes? That's the buyer that gets you to completion more securely.
‘Best’ and ‘highest’ are not always the same thing.
We are required by law to conduct anti-money laundering checks on all those selling or buying a property. Whilst we retain responsibility for ensuring checks and any ongoing monitoring are carried out correctly, the initial checks are carried out on our behalf by Lifetime Legal who will contact you once you have agreed to instruct us in your sale or had an offer accepted on a property you wish to buy. The cost of these checks is £85 (incl. VAT), which covers the cost of obtaining relevant data and any manual checks and monitoring which might be required. This fee will need to be paid by you in advance of us publishing your property (in the case of a vendor) or issuing a memorandum of sale (in the case of a buyer), directly to Lifetime Legal, and is non-refundable. We will receive some of the fee taken by Lifetime Legal to compensate for its role in the provision of these checks.