No, I won’t remove erotica from my walls, no matter what agents say

You folks who’ve held onto your five-bedroom houses even though all the kids have left home? You folks who’ve got a craft room? A spacious study?

A year ago, I despised you all. Hoarding empty bedrooms which could be populated by a whole new generation? I wondered what the hell was wrong with you. Selfish gits, I thought.

Now? Now? As the young people would say, I feel ya. The prospect of selling our family home is so awful I can’t cope. It’s not even that I’m sentimental. I’m not even that sentimental. At this stage I still have a good memory – and I’ll be taking memories and photos with me. Some of the 40-year-old kindy drawings are headed for the recycling bin, though. Don’t tell my kids.

Why am I in this slough of despond?

We’ve looked at lots of places and nothing is like the downsizer desto of my dreams (and twice the cost. I’m an older woman with all the super problems that brings).

Worse than that – far worse than that – we have to sell through a real estate agent. Lying liars who lie. Clearly #notallrealestateagents but too many. Industrial scale underquoting to prospective buyers. Overquoting to prospective sellers (aww, the market was just not there on the day).

So who do you pick? The person who predicts he can sell your place for millions of dollars more than you dreamt possible? He’s saying that with confidence even though I can’t find a single other comparable house in my suburb sold for that kind of money. I’ve taken the advice of Macquarie University’s Cathy Sherry who says, go to all the open homes, take notes, check sales. Online visits are never the same.

Or should I choose the man without socks appeal? And heavily rimmed glasses. He wants us to paint all the walls white, to pull plants out to make the garden look bigger, who wants a “Swedish Death Clean” even though you are neither Swedish nor sick. This is called staging and truly, renting a storage unit for $450 a month so my house can look spacious and soulless is the worst. Why can’t people be happy looking at a lived-in house? As for the art on the walls of these houses? Absolutely no way. I’m never giving up my erotica just to sell the house. Can’t handle the heat? Get out of my kitchen.

Should we try the sweet bloke with a female colleague who offers to buy my house? I wonder if he does that with all his prospective clients. Or the guy who’s been around forever, everyone likes him, everyone knows him, but who neighbours, low-key, say is too low-key.

Swedish death cleaning kind of works, though. After this process, you will feel like death – and want to be any nationality which removes you far from the Australian property market.

Oh god. I don’t know. One thing I’m confident of is this. I do not want to hire a real estate agent who is going to lie to me or to prospective purchasers. Turns out the biggest liar gets the biggest listing. A girlfriend tells me she interviewed three real estate agents and picked the one she thought would get the highest price.

“The whole experience was terrible. They promised me a lot of money and then, of course, during the campaign managed my expectations down, so I was disappointed with the end result.”

Sure, she had a happy ending because she found somewhere lovely to live – but she says the huge stamp duty and the out-of-control demand for levies for strata puts everyone off moving. And that’s before we even get to choosing the agent. Everyone I spoke to seemed absolutely lovely. Seemed. But I want someone who is ethical as well. Is that too much to ask?

Why are agents like this? Old mate Andrew Hornery, former fabulous Herald gossip guru, wrote last week there’s been a 30 per cent increase in real estate agents in Australia in the decade to 2024. That means there are more than 100,000 real estate agents looking for work, that is, houses to sell. Their next big lump of cash. Commission! Commission! Commission! (Which, by the way, has become a lot smaller over the last 10 years. If you are paying 2 per cent, you are paying far too much).

Do I trust lists of house prices? Well, I feel like I have more trust in the actual figures from actual sales than I do in someone trying to get my listing.

There are a couple of things which need to happen. One, we need access to the reserve. Yes we do. We, all of us, cannot be spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on reports and documents when we will never get to put our paddle up. Last year, I spent nearly a grand and the bidding started where we had to stop.

Our paddle? Left in our canoe. It ended up being half a million over the buyer’s guide. So I love the prospect of the publication of the reserve.

We need the publication of the reserve.

Plus, that dreaded note on real estate sites! Price withheld. I’ll tell you what should be withheld, and that’s any further space for real estate agents who won’t reveal the truth about their sales (always blaming it on the owner). What bulldust is that? It protects the agent’s reputation and nothing more. Perhaps sites should ban any agent which says it can’t reveal the truth about sales.

As for time on market, this masthead’s Lucy Macken says we shouldn’t concern ourselves with time on market. It might be good for agents to churn through sales, but it doesn’t prove they are great salespeople. It proves they’ve persuaded you to settle. Speed is of the essence if you are trying to get rick quick.

We all need to settle for more, much more.

Jenna Price is a writer and columnist.

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