Why I’ll talk you out of a unit sometimes

A client asked me once, halfway through a viewing, whether I was even allowed to say what I had just said. I had told her the flat was wrong for her. She had been to eleven viewings by then, and nobody had told her that a single one was wrong for anything.

I do it maybe four or five times a year. It is not a policy and it is not a personality. It is what happens when the numbers and the flat disagree, and somebody in the room has to say so before the option fee is paid.

It costs me, and I would rather have that on the table first. An agent who tells you they have no incentive is lying to you about something small in order to be trusted on something big. A no is a commission I do not get back, and sometimes the client buys nothing at all that year. I still think it is the cheapest thing I do.

What it sounds like when I do it

It is never “don’t buy this”. That is not my call and it would not be true — I have been wrong about a flat and right about the numbers in the same afternoon. It is a sentence with a number in it, and then a pause long enough for you to do something with it.

Four things make me open my mouth. They are the four you cannot renovate your way out of:

• The lease, measured against the age you will be when it matters. Sixty-two years is comfortable at thirty-four and a financing problem at fifty-five. CPF usage tapers with the remaining lease, not with how much you like the kitchen — and whoever buys it from you in fifteen years is borrowing against whatever is left of it.
• The thing about the layout that cannot move. A second bedroom that fits a bed and nothing else. A household shelter eating the only wall a wardrobe could stand against. Paint fixes a great deal. Circulation fixes nothing.
• What the last three transactions in the block actually closed at — not what the current listings are asking. If your offer needs the valuation to come in above every one of them, you are the person paying that difference, in cash, on completion day.
• The gap between the price and your own ceiling. If the flat only works with the loan stretched and the Ordinary Account emptied, it is not a home yet. It is a monthly obligation with a door on it.

If none of the four come up, I say nothing and we go and look at the next one. Most weekends, none of them come up.

“A no costs me one commission. Staying quiet costs you the next ten years of Saturdays.”

The one I still think about

Two years ago a couple asked me to write an offer on a top-floor unit looking out over the whole estate. It was, genuinely, the nicest flat I had shown them. The lease had fifty-eight years left on it. He was forty-nine.

So I did the sums out loud in the car park. What CPF would and would not cover at that lease at that age. What the cash top-up on completion would come to. What somebody buying it from them at sixty-four would be able to borrow against it. It took about four minutes and nobody enjoyed a single one of them.

They bought something else four months later — two floors lower, no view, thirty-one more years on the lease. Last October he sent me a photograph of the valuation letter with three exclamation marks after it. I do not think I was clever. I think I was the only person in that car park with nothing to lose by saying the number.

What the honesty costs, on both sides

Here is my side, since nobody writes it down. Commission is a percentage of a price I helped set, so a no is that number gone, and the four Saturdays that went into the shortlist with it. There is no clause anywhere that pays an agent for the deal she talked somebody out of.

Here is yours. Overpay by forty thousand on a flat you hold for eight years and you have not lost forty thousand. You have lost that, plus the interest you paid to borrow it, plus the CPF accrued interest you owe your own account when you sell, plus whatever the deposit on the next place was going to be. That is the arithmetic I am weighing against one commission, and it is not close.

Which is why I would rather you turned up to the first viewing already knowing your own number. The affordability calculator runs the same stress test the bank does — 4%, not the rate you will actually pay — and it takes about two minutes. Bring the figure with you and I can spend the viewing on the flat instead of on the loan.

When I keep quiet

I want to be careful here, because “I’ll be honest with you” is the most oversold line in this industry and I have no interest in selling it either.

I do not talk people out of homes over taste. If you love a flat I find plain, that is not a problem for me to solve — my opinion about the tiles is worth nothing and it is not my flat. I do not argue with anyone paying a little over for the block their mother lives in, because proximity is a real return and it has never once shown up in a transaction table. And I do not do any of it late. If something has to be said it gets said before the option fee, not on the afternoon you are choosing curtains.

The rule is short. If the reason is something you can see and I cannot value, I keep quiet. If it is something I can value and you cannot see yet, I say it once, and then it is yours.

So: sometimes, yes. Not often, and never as a performance. Work with me and you will hear that a flat is right far more often than you will hear that it is wrong — but you will hear both, and you will hear the second one early enough to still do something about it.

That is the whole thing. It is not a technique. It is just cheaper, for both of us, than the alternative.

— MG

UnapprovedMichele did not write this post. It was written to the card copy that already existed, to give the template something real to render, and the date on it is invented too. Read it as a shape to correct.