Straighthander with Christian Gibson

Are real estate agents the new rock stars’ Obviously, they bloody well think so based on the number of full and half page ads I’ve seen in a certain Eastern Suburbs glossy weekly featuring their flabby jowels and scraped back hair recently!
What a pack of toss-pots!

Personally, I fail to see how painfully staged ‘location’ shots of Bondi Beach covered in these morons with shirts open to the sternum, devil-may-care smiles and high heels gaily hung over the shoulder (and that’s just the men) is supposed to bring in business. Is it to appear ‘down’ with the ‘lifestyle” Or ‘connected’ with the ‘Bondi vibe” The only thing they should be connected to is a tazer.

And the real estate sales jargon is getting worse, much worse. Some recent gems:

‘A private haven of opulence’, meaning ‘if you have six mill and don’t want to know your neighbours, this pile is for you’.
‘Flowing open interiors’, meaning ‘they knocked a couple of walls down’.
‘Brushed with sun-drenched light’, meaning ‘I ran out of ideas’. I ask you, dear readers, how can light not be ‘sun-drenched” Maybe it sells better than ’60 watt globe-drenched light’ but to drench light in sun and then brush it onto a building is impossible using any hardware I’ve seen at Bunnings, Rose Bay. 
‘Seamless indoor-outdoor sensibility’, meaning ‘this property has a sliding door to balcony’.
‘An opportunity to add value’, meaning ‘a dump that requires the purchase price to be spent again to make it liveable’.

The other gag agents pull is tell you how much they’ve sold ‘over reserve’ recently. The reserve is an arbitrarily set figure determined by recent sales, the vendor’s hopes and the agent’s opinion.

That some properties sell for amounts far in excess of the reserve may not have much to do with an agent or their ‘marketing’ campaign at all. It may simply be that on auction day the planets aligned and two or more bidders who were tired and emotional from looking at shit-heaps for six months decided they’d had a gutful and wanted to end it all by placing a winning bid. Cue bidding war. Plenty of houses to be sold at auction never hit reserve. Whose fault is that’

The agents may say it was a ‘greedy vendor’ or ‘the market’s a bit flat’ – one thing you’ll never see is an agent taking the blame.