21/115-119 Burns Bay Road, Lane Cove

The background

Professional styling and the strategic use of a stage one off-market campaign were instrumental in securing the impressive result that Scarlett Stinton and Peter Gordon achieved for a two-bedroom townhouse at 21/115-119 Burns Bay Road, Lane Cove.

Strategies we employed in this campaign

Scarlett comments, “We recommended trialling an off-market approach at the start to test the waters, which brought in a number of buyers. The property was in completely original condition and early viewers saw value in the $800,000-$900,000 range. Since we had a guide of $850,000-$900,000, we decided to take the property to the open market to cast the net wider, and also opened our database to out-of-area buyers in order to drive competition between local buyers.

“On our recommendation the vendors paid the $4,000 styling costs, which we believe to be an incredible investment that can add tens of thousands of dollars to the value of the home. To help it better resonate with buyers, we also undertook some minor pre-sale works on behalf of the vendors, who had since moved into a nursing home.

“After just three open homes we had buyers making offers. Following an initial offer of $920,000 we ended up selling for $1.08m – nearly a 20% increase. There were a number of challenges that we faced along the way, most notably a falling market in which buyer confidence was declining thanks to two interest rate rises during the campaign and rapidly changing market conditions. On top of this, the property required at least $100,000 of work to bring it back to standard, which was something we were very upfront about with buyers.

“To ensure our vendors had peace of mind that we were handling everything with care throughout the process, we kept in regular communication and provided detailed vendor reports.”

So what did the clients have to say about the referral-based sale? “We found Scarlett and Peter to be honest, professional, reliable and a pleasure to deal with. They know the Lane Cove market extremely well, which ensured the right approach was adopted for the sale of our property.”