Anybody who believes selling a home is a simple matter of placing an ad, guiding would-be buyers through Open Homes and watching the hammer fall at auction, hasn’t been on Geoff Grist’s Journey To Sold.
The fourth book by the best-selling author and otherwise real estate agent with R&W Mosman/Neutral Bay examines in forensic detail the process of selling a home from the fateful decision to sell, right up until settlement.
Grist, who has been buying and selling homes for 40 years and has spent 15 years as a real estate agent, is a firm believer in the power of the process.
“I am very process driven,” says Grist. “I like to have things written down and to let people know this is what I am going to do.”
Penning his 177-page book is not so much about giving away the secrets of selling but educating customers about what actually happens en route to a profitable property sale, including the predictable and not quite so predictable.
“I believe the better educated vendors are the smoother the process will be,” says Grist. “I don’t like surprises and they don’t either. I say put your trust in the process and we will work through the journey together.
“I don’t make money out of writing these books but they allow me to demonstrate to my clients that I have a process. As a listing tools it helps; go with the guy who wrote the book, he clearly knows what he’s talking about.”
Grist first put pen to paper in 2001, with the release of 500 Award-winning Small Business Secrets, published by Simon & Schuster.
The book was written off the back of winning the 1997 Telstra Small Business Award and achieved 40,000 sales, putting it firmly in best-seller territory.
He sold the business, Audio Sound Centre, to Panavision in 2000 and spent the next few years discovering that staying home and playing with your children was a recipe for boredom.
Chance intervened when he engaged Robert Simeon, a director at R&W Mosman, to sell his home, one of around 12 that he has bought, renovated and flipped over the years.
Robert suggested he join the R&W Mosman agency and he’s spent the past 15 years refining the process of real estate sales since.
In 2010 his best-seller was republished under the title 500 Award Winning Business Secrets Checklist. Six years later he wrote his first real estate book, Sold Above Market: How to choose the right real estate agent to sell your property, published by Major St Publishing which specialises in property and business books.
Sales of Sold Above Market topped 10,000, providing ample reason for Major St to sign up again for Journey to Sold, and another due for release next year.
Knowing your target market is a prerequisite for real estate agents, just as it is for authors in the burgeoning self-improvement and self-help category. With home buyers, sellers and real estate agents firmly in his sights there’s potentially thousands with an interest in knowing just what it is that real estate agents do to earn their commission.
Grist says the easy to read format is one of the reasons his books sell so well, a rationale confirmed by its healthy sales at airports.
“Newslink stocks it so you can potentially catch a flight in Sydney and have it read by the time you arrive in Melbourne,” says Grist.
Journey to Sold’s timing could not have been better. The five-year boom in which anything sold with little apparent effort followed by a confidence sapping two-year correction which appears to have finally bottomed out, has more people once again looking to dip a toe in the property market.
But before doing so they might like to take a lesson or two from Journey to Sold, not only to understand the process but also be aware of the pitfalls, a few of which Grist has shared. Nightmarish moments like air-conditioners failing on the hottest day of the year, fire alarms necessitating evacuation mid-inspection, the vendor dying mid-campaign, and the dog biting a potential buyer who turns out to be a litigious lawyer.
A tale for every sale on the Journey To Sold.