How to Price Your Brisbane Property Without an Agent

A listed price is an asking price. A settled sale is a transaction two parties actually agreed on. Only the second is evidence.

Collect at least six settled sales from the last 90 days, in your suburb, for your property type. In a slower market, widen to 120 days before you widen the geography, recency matters more than proximity when the market is moving.

For each comparable, write down how it differs from your property and what that difference is worth. In inner-Brisbane apartments the variables that move price most are level and outlook, secure parking, internal area, aspect, and the state of the building rather than the unit.

For houses, it is land size and shape, orientation, flood history, whether the block is flat, parking, and the condition of the kitchen and bathrooms.

Be specific. "Better than mine" is not an adjustment. "$25,000 better because it has a second car space and a north aspect" is.

• · Apartments: level, outlook, aspect, internal area, car spaces, body corporate levies, sinking fund health.
• · Houses: land size, slope, orientation, flood mapping, street quality, parking, renovation condition.
• · Both: age, recent works, school catchment, transport access, noise exposure.

Your buyer is not only comparing your property to what sold. They are comparing it to everything else they can inspect this Saturday.

List every current competitor in your price band, and be honest about where yours ranks. If there are eight comparable apartments listed in your building and precinct, your price has to acknowledge that. If yours is the only three-bedroom house on a flat block within a kilometre, it does not.

Improvement bias: owners over-value renovations they paid for. Buyers pay for the result, not the invoice, and rarely reimburse the full cost of a recent kitchen.

Anchoring bias: whatever you paid, and whatever an agent once told you the property was worth, exerts a pull that has nothing to do with the current market.

Attachment bias: the features you love (the tree outside, the quiet street, the layout you got used to) are not universally valued. Some are genuinely liabilities to other buyers.

Set the launch price at, or slightly below, the top of your evidenced range, not above it. A property priced marginally under the range attracts competing buyers and frequently sells for more than one priced above it.

Watch the round-number search brackets. A property priced at $1,010,000 is invisible to every buyer filtering "up to $1,000,000", which on the portals is most of them. Moving to $999,000 costs $11,000 in theory and often gains more than that in competition.

Enquiry volume in week one tells you about price and advertising. Inspection-to-enquiry ratio tells you about presentation. Offers tell you about both.

Strong enquiry with no inspections usually means the photos oversold the property. Strong inspections with no offers usually means a specific objection you have not identified, ask departing buyers directly. Low enquiry from the start almost always means price.

Decide before launch what you will do if week two is quiet. A decisive single adjustment in week three works. Three small adjustments over ten weeks signals to the market that you will keep dropping.