When buying a new home for your family, the typical process looks a little something like this: browse online, inspect in-person, fall in love with a particular home, disregard the others, and put your money down to purchase your dream dwelling. It’s an operation steeped in immersion and emotion; one that, in most cases, is undertaken entirely on the ground.
But what if you’re not on the ground? What if you’re relocating from a totally different state, or even a different country? The process of finding a new place to live becomes a little trickier – but certainly not impossible.
It’s a challenge we’ve dealt with since our company’s inception, given our client base has largely lived abroad. In fact, even prior to the pandemic (a time where remote buying has become much more the norm), 93 percent of our purchases had never been physically inspected by our clients.
This figure applies to both investments and family homes. But while an investment property is inherently a more objective purchase, we recognise that a family home generally isn’t; it’s one that the buyer really needs to connect with and adore.
So, how do we create an ‘on-the-ground’ experience when our clients can’t physically inspect or develop a connection to a new home for their family? Here’s some insight into the way we work.
Close discernment of our clients’ needs
The first step in our process is, naturally, to understand the unique needs of the client. An investment purchase is mostly evaluated on the client’s financial goals, but a family home must speak to their individual design taste, requirements, location preference and future plans.
To truly understand a client’s needs, we undertake an exhaustive survey so we can really ascertain their desires across lifestyle and financial drivers, and practical considerations such as size, bedrooms and amenities.
We also complete a visual exercise where we gauge the kinds of homes they like, as well as a suburb or region deep dive where the client can effectively pick where they want us to search.
Following that, we collate an extensive buyers agent brief that covers the suburbs and types of homes they’d like to live in. We then pass the brief to our state-based buyers agents to execute. There’s a lot that goes into each purchase, and we certainly don’t take the process lightly.
Close and constant communication, with plenty of support
Throughout the purchase, we prefer not to see ourselves solely as buyers agents. Instead, we become a client’s professional services advisor, counselor and friend – and, in some cases, a quasi member of the family who’s along for the ride. We ensure we can address and support our clients’ needs, be they practical or personal.
To do this, we set up a WhatsApp group to maintain constant communication and schedule weekly face-to-face meetings so we can offer more comprehensive updates. During these meetings, we run through the nuts and bolts of the project (purchase status, financials, legal and construction, if they’re undertaking a renovation or build), but we also back them through the emotional highs and lows.
A family home can be a deeply intense purchase, so going above and beyond to act as a trustworthy form of support makes all the difference to our client’s property journey – especially when they’re operating remotely.
Leaning on tech tools
It probably goes without saying that technology is a crucial part of creating an ‘on-the-ground’ experience. For each client, we create a multiservice online portal that details everything they need to know about the state, region, suburb, street and property.
When it comes to individual properties, we document the home and surrounding area with detailed photos and videos – effectively creating an on-demand virtual tour (you can read more about those here.) We complement these with live tours via video call.
Because tech is such an important arm of our business, we’re currently working on a broader suite of tools that will make this part of the process even better and more immersive for our clients. Through the use of smart tech tools and huge data sets, we believe we can solve all the issues of people buying homes remotely, from understanding their exact purchasing drivers to how the home is remotely viewed. But more on that at a later date!
Navigating the known challenges
In many cases, our clients have lived abroad for several years – more than enough time for the Aussie market to shift quite dramatically. There are numerous challenges involved with this, namely understanding the current market and recognising that particular areas have changed significantly since our clients last encountered them.
But we’re very well-versed in dealing with these challenges. While certainly time and resource-intensive, we work hard to create a comprehensive brief that explains the current state of things in great detail so we can bring our clients up to speed.
We work with our in-house economists to develop a thorough snapshot of the market on both a macro and micro level. Within each client portal, we produce detailed profiles of each suburb we’re exploring so that our clients can get to know the highlights, lowlights and exactly what they’re in for if they choose to live there. In short, it’s all about making our clients feel as if they’re actually in Australia and comprehending the nuances of the local property scene.
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