7 Centenary Avenue, Hunters Hill

The background

Matthew Hayson and Jack Tinworth’s sale of a potential-packed original home on 726sqm at 7 Centenary Avenue, Hunters Hill highlights the advantages of making adjustments mid-campaign in order to capitalise on market forces, with the auction brought forward to meet the active demand from a strong pool of buyers.

Matt comments, “We had a longstanding relationship with the client through our property management department, which helped us win the business. Given the state of the home, we were largely selling a plot of land in a sought-after position and as such we deployed a wide-reaching marketing campaign, tapping into our broad network of builders, developers and property opportunists to drive immediate engagement.

Drone imagery was a key piece of the marketing mix to really showcase the size and location of the site.

Strategies we employed in this campaign

“As always we provided a high level of communication with the vendor and detailed feedback on what we were seeing, hearing and reading from the active buyer pool. Helping a vendor navigate the sale always comes down to being adaptive to this feedback and adjusting to the prevailing market conditions. Following immediate interest being identified in the first week of the campaign, we recommended promoting the reserve price as we had several buyers wanting to make an offer. Promoting the reserve was the fairest and most transparent way we could help the process along and this was a key decision that we collectively made to secure the best outcome. However, we still felt it would be best to run the negotiations through an auction process.

“Demand was solid from a range of builders, developers and families who were looking to build either a single new home or a duplex. We knew from the start that the property would sell, it was simply a matter of locking in the best strategy to negotiate with purchasers. Given that it required extensive work, we had to manage many conversations with buyers about rising building costs and what the end value of the property could be once complete. We also had to advise a number of builders who were looking to put forward lower offers from day one. Despite advising all buyers that we would run the auction, we still had to discuss the process and provide guidance about how to engage with the property.

“After 51 groups had inspected the home and 21 contracts had been issued, we decided to bring the auction forward to capitalise on the keen interest from the many buyers who were in a position to act within the first two weeks of the campaign. There was a lot of push back given the unusual angle of the block but we worked our way through the conversations and had nine buyers registered to bid. On 26 November 2022, after 18 days on the market, it was sold under the hammer for an incredible result of $2.9m.”