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WHAT'S HAPPENING ON CITIFIED VICTORIA
Current market conditions are rooted in supply issues. Attainability, accessibility, affordability all flow from supply side measures. This proposal is a demand side measure that will inevitably cause more supply issues. Buyers tying up multiple properties. Sellers deciding to not bother selling given that they won't know how many times they're going to have to sell their homes. Buyers tying up properties and attempting to flip contracts with no intention of purchasing. Regardless of what many think, our regulatory environment is pretty damn stringent and provides the best level of consumer protection available. This proposal would only apply to the regulated industry, inevitably driving transactions to the unregulated side of the market, thereby stripping away all consumer protections - remember, this is proposed as a consumer protection measure first and foremost.
As for the pricing issue, it's a matter of law - real estate listings are an invitation to treat, not an offer of sale, hence the variability in sale price. It is what it is, we didn't make it up, if you can figure out how to change a few hundred years of common and contract law, go ahead. The dilemma today is that in a fast moving market, prices were very hard to predict, and this current cohort of buyers is now trained to add X$ to every list price, so agents who want to be accurate in their pricing jeopardize having the right buyers look at the property because proper price +X$ make it over priced in the eyes of the buyers that should be looking at it. Not an ideal situation but all market participants are equally responsible for this tactic, sellers ask for it, buyers expect it. I can assure you no one on the inside likes it.
Stop calling it blind bidding. There's nothing blind about it except that the personal, financial and private information of buyers is kept exactly that, private. Which is something we as Canadians have generally placed a high importance on. You know what you're offering on, you should have market comps and up to date data, you should have done your due diligence and you should be completely prepared for how its going to go in our current market. You're anything but blind. An offer is so much more than just money. You're not buying a carpet for the living room here. Its a closed offer process. The same one the Supreme Court of British Columbia uses. Good enough for them, should be good enough for us.
There is no evidence whatsoever that an open offer process would yield significantly different results than our current closed offer process. Of course you hear about someone freaking out and offering way higher than anyone else, but you hear about it because it is newsworthy, and it is newsworthy because it is exceptional. Guess what - it happens at live auctions as well. Jurisdictions with open offer processes-specifically Australia - have their own set of problems unique to their process. The reason they won't change to ours and why we shouldn't change to theirs is because all market participants in both markets know the rules of engagement and understand the process. Changing he sales process so fundamentally would simply swap our set of known issues for a set of completely unknown issues from a practice perspective. Consumer protection practices would go out the window. Here's the important bit - Australia's prices have experienced similar gains to ours and they're experiencing similar supply issues. Same results, different processes - probably not the processes...
...But you know, facts, who cares, real estate agents bad, real estate agents shady.
I'll close with the simple idea that policy should be developed after consultation and after evidence is gathered to support a policy direction. There has been no consultation and there simply is no evidence that this specific proposal, or anything to do with the sales process itself, will help with addressing our fundamental market issue, which all seem to agree, is supply.
