It’s simple. Any rift between the public’s perception of this industry and reality comes from the difference between the emotional price a seller thinks their home is worth, and the market value.

As emotional as we want to get – my house is so cool, we are getting divorced, we paid 450k for it and so on – the market just doesn’t care. They don’t care what you paid for it. Some people are glad you’re getting divorced – it makes them feel better! On top of that, there is a market at play. If you get this, your sale will be quicker and possibly bring in more money.

It’s just that simple. Take two houses that are similar — same size, same age, same area. One sells on a reasonable market for 500k. Then the other one comes onto the market. Common sense would say it is worth 500k. The real estate market is the same as any other market.

If everyone is paying $22 for ANZ shares, you are not going to pay any more. That’s how it works. But what happens is, we decide not what a house is worth, but what we need for it. It gets worse. We actually price our existing house based on what we want to do after we have sold! We want this buyer to buy our next house for us. We want them to pay more because we are separating, because we are building. This is illogical. It would be like having a Toyota (nothing against Toyotas) and wanting to buy a Porsche. You cannot put the price of the Porsche on the Toyota. It is exactly the same with your house.

So the agent has to juggle between the emotional price you want and the market value –- to the point that if they don’t agree with this made-up price or don’t try hard enough to get it, they get thrown in favour of someone who panders to them.

Decide before you start on how you want to play this. We need to stay as logical as we can here and note the facts, not the emotion. An agent trained in conversations will talk to you about this and how you want to play it.

If we engineer it incorrectly, the agent has to play the game or run the risk of losing your listing and the commission that goes with it. This game is costly in the long run in terms of time and money. I will show you that when we look at pricing later on. You get this right and everything else will flow off it.