Somewhere along the way, property became a national obsession. Not just a necessity, not simply an aspiration, but a full-blown cultural fixation. We have the television programmes, the weekend supplements, the dinner-party conversations that drift, inevitably, towards what someone paid for something somewhere and whether it was worth it. We have become, as a nation, remarkably fluent in the language of property.
And yet, for all of that familiarity, the fundamentals of buying and selling well remain as misunderstood as ever.
By Gordon McGuire & Bruce Patterson
“People come to us thinking they understand the market because they’ve been watching it from the outside…”
“People come to us thinking they understand the market because they’ve been watching it from the outside…”
This is one of the more curious contradictions of modern life. People who would never dream of performing their own surgery will confidently override professional advice on pricing strategy for their biggest financial asset. Buyers who have spent months researching school catchments and commute times will make an offer based on gut instinct and a single viewing. Sellers who have watched every episode of every property programme ever broadcast will instruct the agent who told them the highest number, because it confirmed what they already wanted to believe.
The information has never been more abundant. The decision-making has not noticeably improved.
There is a version of property knowledge that is, in reality, property familiarity. Knowing the names of areas. Recognising a good kitchen when you see one. Having a sense, vague but confident, of what things are worth. This is not expertise. It is pattern recognition dressed up as insight, and it leads people into decisions that a genuinely informed perspective would have prevented.
The property television genre deserves some of the credit for this. The glamorisation of programmes built around transformation, aspiration, and the satisfying conclusion of a successful purchase have created a viewing public that feels thoroughly briefed on the subject. In practice, what they have absorbed is the aesthetic of property, the language, the look, the emotional arc, without the commercial substance that sits beneath it.
“People who would never dream of performing their own surgery will confidently override professional advice on pricing strategy.”
“People who would never dream of performing their own surgery will confidently override professional advice on pricing strategy.”
Pricing strategy, buyer qualification, negotiation, timing, positioning, these are not subjects that make for compelling Saturday night television. They are, however, the subjects that determine whether a sale succeeds or fails.
“People come to us thinking they understand the market because they’ve been watching it from the outside,” says Bruce Patterson, Managing Director of Corum’s Ayrshire offices. “They know what they like. They know what they think things are worth. What they often don’t know is how the process actually works, and that gap between familiarity and understanding is where things go wrong. I’ve seen sellers turn down the best offer they were ever going to get because it didn’t feel right. Feeling and knowing are very different things.”
The democratisation of property information has been, on balance, a good thing. Buyers are better informed about areas, prices, and market conditions than at any point in the industry’s history. That transparency has raised standards and made it harder for poor practice to go unnoticed.
But it has also produced a particular kind of confident ignorance that is genuinely costly. The seller who has done their own research and arrived at a figure the market will not support. The buyer who has decided, based on little more than instinct and a couple of viewings, that a property is overpriced and makes an offer that reflects that conviction rather than the reality of the competition around them. The vendor who second-guesses their agent’s advice at every stage because they have read something online that appears to contradict it.
Confidence, in property, is not the same as competence – and the gap between the two is measured, ultimately, in outcomes.
“The market has never been more transparent, but that transparency can give people a false sense of what they actually know.”
“The market has never been more transparent, but that transparency can give people a false sense of what they actually know.”
There is a reason that the buyers and sellers who consistently achieve the best results in this market are the ones who engage most openly with professional advice rather than least. Not because they are less informed, but because they understand the difference between information and judgement. Between knowing what something sold for and understanding why. Between reading the market and being in it, every day, at every level, in every conversation.
“I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the people who get the best results are almost never the ones who think they know best,” says Bruce. “They’re the ones who ask the right questions, listen to the answers, and trust the process. That sounds straightforward. In practice, it’s rarer than you’d think. The market has never been more transparent, but that transparency can give people a false sense of what they actually know.”
The property obsession is not going anywhere, and nor should it. Homes matter. The decision to buy or sell is one of the most significant most people will ever make, and the appetite to understand it, research it, and engage with it seriously is entirely healthy.
What is worth examining is the assumption that familiarity with the subject is the same as being equipped to navigate it. The glossy version of property, the before and after, the dramatic reveal, the champagne at the end, is a compelling story. It is not, however, a preparation for the realities of pricing strategy, buyer management, and negotiation that determine whether that story ends well.
The most commercially successful buyers and sellers in this market are not the most enthusiastic students of property culture. They are the ones who know what they know, recognise what they do not, and find the right people to fill that gap.
That is not a particularly exciting conclusion. But in property, as in most things, the unglamorous truth tends to outperform the appealing fiction.