Patience beat an over-quoted campaign — Malvern East
Secured the property roughly four months after the original campaign collapsed under over-quoting — at $1.2M below the original agent's guide.
The brief
Our client was looking for a family home in Malvern East. On the first open of a Finch Street property, we walked through together as the first group of the day. The agent's opening line to every buyer was direct: if you don't have $8,000,000, don't bother coming in.
Our client didn't have $8M to spend. They were ready to walk out. We encouraged them to go through anyway — because the house met every brief they'd given us, and we weren't convinced the price the agent was quoting reflected what the property would actually transact at.
Our approach
After walking through, our read was straightforward: the agent was over-quoting by about a million dollars. The home was worth somewhere around $7M–$7.2M — not $8M. And we'd seen this pattern before. When a campaign opens with a guide that's significantly above market, every qualified buyer reacts the same way: they vote with their feet. They don't lodge an offer they think will be rejected. They walk.
We told our client what we expected to happen. The campaign would run, the property wouldn't attract offers, the agent would be replaced, and a more realistic guide would eventually bring the property back to its real market. We estimated four months. Our client didn't quite believe it at the time — they just wanted to move on to something they could actually buy.
That's exactly how it played out. The original campaign closed without a single offer. The listing came off authority. A new agent picked it up. We sat down with the new agent and the vendor, walked through the data on comparable sales, and laid out where the true market sat. The vendor's expectations adjusted to reality.
The outcome
We purchased the property for just over $6.8 million — $1.2M below the original agent's guide, and around $400,000 below where we believe it would have transacted had it been quoted correctly and taken to auction in the first campaign.
The lesson — for buyers, vendors, and advocates — is the same. Over-quoting doesn't lift a sale price. It collapses the buyer pool. The qualified buyers who could have competed for this home in the first campaign never made a bid, because they'd been told the price was something they couldn't reach. Patience, market intelligence, and an honest read on value did the rest.
Wondering whether a quoted price is real?
Over-quoting hurts vendors and frustrates buyers. The right read on a campaign — and the patience to wait for it to correct — is often the difference between paying the guide and paying fair value. A free conversation with Toby is the starting point.
