Not too long ago, my family and I bought a home in a new neighborhood. I chose a buyer advocate by going on SRX.com.sg and reviewing the digital Agent CVs.
Each CV has the agent’s area of specialization, testimonials, and an SRX-verified track record of current listings and past transactions.
Our real estate agent took me through a three step process:
- Buyer consultation
- Search, shortlisting, and home viewing
- Pricing to offer.
In the end, she negotiated a further 15% off an already discounted Listing Price (as a result of the Cooling Measures). And, the developer paid her commission. Believe me, she earned every dollar.
Even though I know a thing or two about property and have access to the best information and analytic tools in the market, I appreciated our agent’s advice, hard work, and negotiation skills. We could not have done it without her.
Our housing requirements made us a complicated family to serve. First, we are a multigenerational family. Second, we had children entering primary school. Third, several of us had extensive experience in property and are financially prudent. Fourth, we were open to the possibility of moving to a number of different neighborhoods. In real estate, too much choice is not necessarily a good thing. It means making a decision can take a long time.
This turned out to be true in our case. In the end, we viewed over 50 homes.
We knew that we had a great agent by the way she conducted her buyer consultation. She took the time to understand our needs before she started suggesting options and solutions. As I mentioned, it was not easy to factor in all our requirements, but once she did, she was able to use that knowledge to focus the search and shortlist a large selection of homes for us to view.
As the Advanced Search bar from SRX.com.sg illustrates, there are many factors that one could consider when searching a home.
In residential search, there are three different types of properties: HDB, landed, and condominiums/apartments.
Then there is location. In our case it was important to be near a primary school, but others might prioritize searching for a home near work, a club, a shopping mall, a park, a golf course, or in a particular neighborhood.
SRX Property’s old offices used to be at the Bosch Building off of Upper Thomson. When colleagues would enter Bosch Building into portals that use traditional keyword search, they would get irrelevant search results with some listings located on the other side of Singapore. The reason is that the keyword search was picking up Bosch appliances that were detailed in the amenities section of the listing. So SRX Property created location-based search which links homes to landmarks like office buildings, making it possible to search by location and get only relevant results.
But searching by location and property type was not enough for my family. We also wanted to filter the search by price, construction date, tenure, size, and bedrooms.
The end result is that we had a long list of homes to review online.
Working with our agent, we read through each of the listings and shortlisted fifty of them. She then scheduled the home viewings and provided us with a Home ReportTM on each home.
At this point, we had invested only a few hours in identifying and understanding 50 homes. In the old days, it would have been impossible to have done this.
But, the tough part was just beginning. Technology makes shortlisting and understanding homes for sale relatively fast and easy. The hard part is negotiating the right home at the right price. In next week’s column, I will tell you how my buyer agent used 50 home viewings to put us into the right home at the right price.