Neil Jenman is passionate, he is also a smart cunning businessman. Take an Industry where eithics are questioned in some parts of the media and add a maverick and you have a human headline.
Neil Jenman is a smart man, maybe just too smart for his own boots! Having followed his views in real estate guides and through a hungry media I cannot help but see “tell them what they want to hear” come through in all he has to say.
Firstly, go to his website Jenman.com.au and you can see he thinks he is on to something with,”Don’t sign anything” splattered all over the place.
However, one thing is missing, it is nearly impossible to find an agent and as he thinks that advertising a property reduces the price you can achieve for the vendor property – well, you guessed it their is not a property listing in sight.
As a quick note, the Jenman site is a perfect example of bad design. People do not read websites, they scan from left to right for the information they are looking for. This site is just full of warning signs, pages and pages of text and ramblings. This weakens any point he is trying to make.
Back to the article
The Real Estate Boom
The real estate boom was the perfect time for Jenman to hit the world, with so many buyers and so few listings, pretty much any property in any area was going to fetch a pretty good price, with or without advertising. This was Neil Jenman’s time and he pounced.
Now there are hundreds of agents across Australia calling his tune. It will be very hard for any of these professionals to ever go back to the traditional way of selling properties because, this would be going against the ethics that they continually preach today.
However Neil Jenman will always be in demand as the renegade. I think in the future he will probably advocate people selling homes themselves, it is the only direction he has not taken yet and it will further boost his profile. (to the detriment of his “Approved Agents”).
Cooling Market
Times will only get tougher for Jenman Agents as the market cools further because the very principal of selling a property when there is a lack of genuine buyers is to reach the potential buyers through target marketing.
Ethics
Now I do not want to question what Neil stands for, because it is quite clear and he certainly has some points, but most of his claims are not against Real Estate Agencies but are against some of the people working for these agencies.
All industry sectors have less than satisfactory people working in them. Sales industries whether it is houses, cars, mobile phones, or steak knives attract more than their fair share of rogues and real estate is no different.
One of the points Jenman actually makes a contradicts one of his code of ethics and that is – that advertising your property lets potential buyers know how long it has been on the market and therefore, the longer it is on the market the more this puts the buyer in control.
Am I then to believe that if a property has not sold through a Jenman agent for a period of time that they tell a potential buyer that it has just been placed on the market? Or do they ethically disclose that “to be honest with you sir/madam this property has been on the market for 6 months now”. The only way around this is to actually hide the truth. Not very ethical!
Truth is there can be any number of factors in relation to a property not selling, too high a price is one, it might also be a unique property that may only attract a certain buyer, another conclusion may be that there are not alot of buyers at the time it has been offered.
Advertising helps sell anything.
Think about this. Put your VCR up for sale at a reasonable price, place it on your coffee table and wait for someone to call you. What no one called? Amazing!
At the same time put an ad in the local newspaper for your VCR that reads “VCR For Sale, Good Condition, NTSC/Pal playback, Long Play/Short Play $150.00 ONO.”
I think you have more chance of selling it in the newspaper, than you do of the VCR turning into a DVD player with an 80 GIG Hard drive.
You will get phone calls and the market and skill of the negotiator will determine the price. Most people want to bargain a price, so it takes a certain skill and confidence to keep the price at the requested level. This is why it will always be difficult for people to sell homes themselves, although there will always be a market for this.
Jenman would like you to think that they have hundreds of buyers on their books waiting to purchase and by listing with them, you will tap into their vast resources of eager buyers – a claim any agent can and does make.
The truth is the more people that know about the product or service you are selling, the more likely you are to find a buyer. If your advertising targets a certain audience (Real Estate Portals, Property Guides) then advertising that product or service to that market even further enhances the opportunities.
Every major company, whether it be Microsoft, Virgin Blue or Telstra, only sells such large volumes of their respective products or services by marketing and spreading that marketing to as many potential customers as possible. This fact not even Mr Jenman can deny and his claims that advertising lowers the price is grabbing at straws and makes all of his other arguments look weak