Yahoo Finance AUCTION SECRET: How just $550 could nab your dream home
A Sydney first home buyer was crushed by the auction experience when she started house hunting.
Studying auction strategies made her and her partner feel even worse.
Hiring a buyer's agent for $550 secured their dream home – with just one bid.
The buyer's agent read the body language of other bidders and came in late with a morale-crushing offer.
Related story: 8 words every home buyer needs to know
A Sydney first home buyer has told how a $550 outlay helped secure her dream house at auction.
When Nina Dela Cruz started house-hunting in Sydney with her partner, the whole auction experience was overwhelming and it felt like they would never be able to buy the house they wanted.
"We attended auctions just to get a feel and found it daunting," she told Yahoo Finance.
"We put an offer on one property and lost, realising afterwards it is because we didn't know how to negotiate and what questions to ask. We also lost on [a] previous auction because it was our first auction and we really didn't know what we were doing."
Dela Cruz and her partner then decided to study auction strategy to better prepare themselves for the next purchase attempt – but that only laid bare their inadequacies.
"The more we read and learned the more we felt overwhelmed… There was so much to it, having a strategy, reading people's body language, actions and knowing the pre and post auction process," she said.
"We realised we wouldn't be able to do it."
Research conducted by Westpac revealed last week that 56 per cent of home buyers were too intimidated to purchase at auction, and 46 per cent were not confident they knew what to do.
You can't avoid auctions in Sydney
Sydney, unfortunately for buyers like Dela Cruz, is a city obsessed with auctions. Buoyant property prices in the past decade have seen auctions become the default method of sale for much of the metropolis.
Meanwhile, Dela Cruz had her heart set on a house in the southern suburb of Revesby and did not want to lose the auction.
She needed help, and that's when she and her partner hired buyer's agent Cameron Porter.
"Cameron walked us through the process, easing our worry and anxiety,” she said.
“He was communicating with us and just holding our hand through the pre-auction process.
"He was liaising with the agent and getting insights and passing it on to us."
But his value really came through on auction day, when Porter worked out the circumstances of the other registered bidders and selected a bidding strategy to suit.
Reading body language
"[An auction] puts everyone in a pressure cooker. It puts a deadline for the purchaser and also a deadline for the vendor," Porter told Yahoo Finance.
"We are the emotional filter… If you get excited about a property, you come and talk to me and I'm going to have a strategy on the day that we'll execute."
Under such pressure, the process can spiral out of control when multiple parties keep piling on thousands of dollars with competing bids. A good buyer's agent, according to Porter, will know when rival bidders are reaching their limit and will pounce accordingly.
"I'll wait and read their body language. And come in at the end," Porter said.
He successfully secured the Revesby home with just one bid – the winning one.
"I was so glad that it wasn't us bidding and I was just a watcher on the sideline," Dela Cruz said.
"When the hammer came down I was in shock and shaking... His strategy of holding back and coming at the end with strong aggressive bids did it."
Dela Cruz and her partner ended up paying $15,000 below their budget, and $3,000 under the maximum they set for the Revesby home.
"There was a mix of bidders, with other first home buyers, but they didn't have a weapon like Cameron… [The] $550 investment on our buyer's agent was well spent."
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