– Alison Hall nearly abandoned her plan to sell her Papatoetoe home due to low offers.
– Agent Ash Singh negotiated with the retirement village and a bidder, securing a better deal.
– The auction resumed after two hours, and the home sold, allowing Hall to move forward.
Alison Hall was ready to give up on her retirement dreams.
She planned to sell her two-bedroom unit in Papatoetoe, South Auckland, and use the funds to buy an apartment in a retirement village.
However, buyers were nowhere near her magic number, and all seemed lost.
Hall showed up for the sale of her Fenton Street home last week at Ray White Manukau’s auction room and watched despondently as the bidding paused at $610,000 – well below what she had hoped to get.
Her agent Ash Singh disappeared to talk with the highest bidder, who could only stretch to another $5000 – still not enough for Hall to buy her new home, for which she had already paid a small deposit.
Hall’s two-bedroom unit on Fenton Street, in Papatoetoe, Auckland, sold under the hammer after more than two hours of negotiations. Photo / Supplied
Hall told OneRoof she was ready to walk away. “I had reached the stage where I thought, ‘I’m over it and if it goes, it goes and if it doesn’t, then I stay where I am.’”
Singh suggested she call the retirement village and see whether they would drop the price based on what she could get for her unit. But the retirement village had already significantly discounted the price of the two-bedroom apartment, and Hall thought it was unlikely.
“He said to me, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’. I said, ‘Well, it’s up to you, but you are going to have to ring.’”
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Hall was full of nerves and feeling the cold, so she sat in her car while Singh made the call to the village’s sales manager and put his negotiation skills to work.
“I said to him, ‘Look this is the situation. We had seven bidders, and it’s not going to get much better than this, so if you want her to move in, the only way I can get it done is with some help from you.’”
While he was waiting for his request to be redirected to the retirement village’s head office, he phoned one of the other registered bidders who had already left and agreed to put in a higher offer.
Hall had made a lot of improvements to her home, including adding a new kitchen. Photo / Supplied
Several hours later, the retirement village’s sales manager called him back and agreed to drop the price.
Singh went and told Hall the good news. They crunched the numbers again, and this time they were able to make it work. “I was gobsmacked, I have to say,” Hall told OneRoof.
The auction resumed two hours and 11 minutes after opening, and Hall’s property sold under the hammer for an undisclosed price.
Hall said without Singh’s “absolute doggedness”, she would have given up.
Her view of real estate agents had also changed entirely. “In times gone past, the reputation of car salesmen and real estate agents was that you just didn’t trust them.”
However, she said she had put her trust in Singh and it had paid off. “Without Ash, I would have been stonkered,” she said.
“He was brilliant. I couldn’t have asked for a better or a nicer agent.”
Singh admitted it was one of the hardest deals he had done, but also one of the most fun and rewarding.
“Normally, you don’t let an auction stay open for that long. But I kept saying to the auctioneer, ‘Hey, don’t pass the property in, I know it’s taking time, but just give me a shot, I know I’m going to close this.'”
“We all thought it [the auction] was going to go a lot better, a lot sooner. The fact that we were able to get it done still on the day meant a lot.”