Secured six days after our first conversation, roughly $40,000 below market value.
Kathy came to me through her mortgage broker after more than six months of searching. She had inspected hundreds of homes, lost sleep over the process and still had not made a single offer.
It was not that she could not find anything she liked. She had seen plenty of homes she would happily have lived in. What was missing was the confidence to know what any of them were actually worth, and the certainty that she was not about to make an expensive mistake on the biggest purchase of her life.
The first thing I did was listen. Before we looked at a single property I wanted to understand what was really holding her back, because the problem was never the volume of homes she was seeing.
When a home she had described as perfect passed in at auction, we moved. I completed full due diligence on the property, assessed its value against genuinely comparable recent sales, coordinated with her conveyancer and built a negotiation strategy off the back of the evidence rather than the asking price.
Most of the work, though, was giving Kathy the information and the reassurance she needed to make the call herself.
We secured her first home six days after our first conversation, at approximately $40,000 below market value, negotiated directly with the agent after the property passed in.
After six months of searching, the whole thing was done inside a week.
Kathy did not need to see more properties. She needed someone to tell her honestly what a home was worth and to stand beside her while she made the decision.
That is the pattern I see again and again. Buyers assume the answer is more inspections when the real gap is knowing value and having someone in their corner. In Kathy's words: "Justin was wonderful, patient, supportive and literally held my hand to get my first property. He took a lot of stress off me."
