Misleading and lying agents lose trust of the buying public. Gen Y most sceptical.

News segments spruiking the real estate market and reminding buyers to hurry up and buy now or miss out for ever has been the staple of 6PM news bulletins on Saturday night.

But the tide might be changing.

Channel 10 reports tonight of a fickle and cautious buying public, smarting up to the used-house salesman rhetoric.

“With the distraction of the federal election over, the Sydney and Melbourne property markets have had record high auction numbers this weekend. But new research shows that Aussies young and old aren’t necessarily buying the real estate rhetoric” reported Channel 10.

“But increasingly savvy buyers are suspicious of real estate experts and their vested interests” – Can’t understand why?

According to the first quarterly LEDA Real Estate and ReachTEL Consumer Property Confidence (CPC) Index of 1,700 buyers, only 53 percent trust what the real estate industry said about the property market.

And only 20% said they trusted real estate agents.

Barry Goldman, LEDA founder told Real Estate Business “In principle, the industry has a pretty poor reputation when it comes to truth and honesty,”

“The biggest issue is that most of the industry commentary is generated by the self-interest of real estate agents or, alternatively, the self-interest of the media that publishes advertising for real estate.”

“Effectively, the media wants advertising sales, so they will always try to put a positive slant on the real estate market – irrespective of the conditions.”

You can watch Ten’s news story here

» Going once, going twice – Channel 10 News, Saturday 14th September 2013.

» Only 1 in 5 Australians trust agents – Real Estate Business, Tuesday 3rd September 2013.




10 Comments

  1. About bloody time! Real estate agents are utter scum and a complete leech on society. I have posted many times about this topic before, so I won’t repeat myself, suffice to say that pretty soon, I hope they all get what’s coming to them. Yes, I hate them. The sooner buyers and sellers of property wake up and realise that REAs are a redundant, unqualified, unregulated bunch of moronic, commission-grabbing, lying salesmen – the better we will ALL be!

  2. You can understand why Gen Y is the most sceptical. They gave up on push media – Murdoch’s newspapers years ago. They know exactly what is going on.

    It’s the baby boomer investors that still believe verbatim everything they read in the paper and have taken the bait.

  3. Well could it be something more to do with Rising unemployment, majority of Australians are up to their eyeballs in credit card debt already as well as the chance of a total superannuation WipeOut. No choice; it has nothing to do with the “smarting up to the used-house salesman rhetoric”. But It’s a good thing the media are catching up on it now.

  4. Yet all the hype the real estate industry is making is actually working as housese are still selling and prices are still rising. Whether these buyers are house investors or FHB’s or both haz never been clarified. The fact remains there are still buyers fueling their own demise and I along with many others very soon will buy their same homes at half price once the recession takes hold and we will have a clear conscience about it.

  5. Houses in my suburb and surroundings are selling for 20-30k more than asking price within days! Another property bubble? I thinks so. Can only end in tears!

  6. I’d be very surprised if the Libs make any changes to Negative Gearing which would stop Boom 2.0 dead in its tracks. I get the feeling that this new government would rather shut hospitals and schools before one negatively geared speculator is sacrificed.

  7. God REA’s are scum. They do ZERO work besides pushing some paperwork that owners can fill in themselves. They try to talk up how difficult it is but selling or buying a house is easy.

    Selling an old 1970’s family home and whacking $20k comission on it for doing zero upgrades results in exactly one thing. The house costing more than its worth.

    The REA and that industry is a complete mess with predatory tactics and ‘financial advice’ it’s so bad. So so bad. They often lie ‘there’s a land shortage’ ‘a house like this only comes on the market once a decade’ ‘house prices double every few years’ ‘most people take out dual income 95% loans… For 30 years’ ‘this house is worth more but the owner needs to sell it…’ We’ve all heard these lies.

    They can’t even afford houses themselves anymore and the ones who already got rich have left the industry. I’ve met so many who have retired because they don’t want the oncoming crash to leave them with angry customers and litigation and they have left the young ones to take the fall. It’s really bad. Really really bad.

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