A home site secured off-market - Toorak
Secured before it was ever for sale, on a longer settlement that suited the buyer and the owner alike.
The brief
Our client was looking for a home site in Toorak. Not a finished house - land with the right position, the right aspect, and the right dimensions to build on.
That is one of the hardest briefs in Melbourne. Sites in Toorak rarely come up. When one does, our client is not only competing with other families. He is competing with builders and developers who have run the numbers before the campaign opens and who know exactly what the land is worth to them.
Waiting for the right site to be listed was not a plan. It was a queue.
Our approach
So we went looking for a site that was not for sale yet.
We walked the streets. That sounds simple, and it is, but it only works if you have spent 20 years in the same few suburbs. What you are really doing is listening. Agents talk. Neighbours talk. Trades working on a house talk. Over time you hear which owners are restless before anyone has signed anything.
On one street we heard that an owner might be thinking about moving. Nothing was listed. Nothing was decided. We knocked on the door and asked.
They were thinking about it. That is a very different conversation from a campaign, and it needs to be handled differently. Someone who has not committed to selling can walk away at any point, and pushing hard is the fastest way to make that happen.
The outcome
The negotiation took time. It was not a matter of agreeing a number and shaking hands.
The thing that unlocked it was the settlement period. An owner who is only thinking about moving usually has one real problem: they have nowhere to go yet. A standard settlement forces them to solve that under pressure, and plenty of owners say no for that reason alone rather than because of the price.
We structured a longer settlement. That gave the owner the time they needed to find their next home. It cost our client nothing he cared about. He was buying a site to build on, not a house to move into next month.
The deal was done off-market, at a price both sides were happy with. Our client got a Toorak site he would never have seen advertised, without bidding against a developer for it.
"Toby was amazing to deal with. Went out of his way to secure an amazing deal for me and my family. Always kept me in the loop of the negotiations and worked extremely hard to get me the right deal as opposed to just getting a deal done!"
Looking for something that is not on the market?
The best sites in Toorak are not advertised. They belong to owners who have not decided to sell yet. Finding them is a matter of knowing the streets and asking at the right moment. A free conversation with Toby is the place to start.
