By Brendan Leahy, Naked Real Estate®

Before you read another word, you should know that one of the three methods I am about to compare is ours. Select Date Sale®⁠ is a Naked Real Estate® method. I have a commercial interest in you choosing it.

So I am going to do the fair thing: tell you where it is the wrong choice, and explain how it actually works rather than just telling you it is better.

I have been selling property in this patch since 2002, with more than 1,500 personal sales. Here is my honest read on the three options.

Private Treaty

Your home is listed with a price, a range or a from-price. Buyers make offers. You negotiate. It is simple, familiar, and buyers understand it immediately.

Its weakness is not the price on the sign. It is what happens after the first offer arrives. Most private treaty sales become a one-on-one negotiation between the seller and whoever moved first. If two other buyers were interested but slower, they often never get the chance to compete, because the property is under offer before they are ready.

The money is not usually lost at the pricing stage. It is lost in the fortnight after the first offer.

Private treaty suits you when your home is easy to price against recent comparable sales, when buyer demand is steady rather than competitive, and when you would rather have a straightforward process than push hard for every last dollar.

Auction

A public bidding process on a set day. Urgency, transparency, and a clear finish line.

Start with what auction genuinely does better, because it is real. If bidding reaches your reserve, the winning bid is unconditional and binding the moment the hammer falls. No finance clause, no building-inspection out, no subject-to-sale. Neither private treaty nor our own method can promise you that. The catch is that it only holds if the bidding gets there. If it does not, the property passes in and you are negotiating with the highest bidder anyway, having spent the campaign and told the market it failed to sell.

One thing to be clear about, because it is often misunderstood: WA has no cooling-off period on any residential sale unless the parties agree to write one in. That is true whether you sell by auction, private treaty or our method, so it is not an auction advantage and I am not going to pretend it is one.

Auction has two real weaknesses in this market.

The first is the buyer pool. A lot of Perth Hills and Foothills buyers need finance approval, a building inspection, a subject-to-sale condition, or a settlement date that lines up with their own move. Auction asks them to bid unconditionally. Some of them simply will not turn up, and you do not know which ones you lost.

The second is structural. At auction, the buyer who gets pushed to their true limit is the underbidder. The winner only has to beat them by one bid. Say the underbidder stops at $995,000; the winner buys at around $1,000,000. They may have been prepared to pay considerably more. You will never know, because the auction stopped asking the moment it had a winner.

Auction suits you when the market is hot, when your likely buyers are genuinely ready to go unconditional, when the property is straightforward enough for public bidding to find its level, and when a certain, binding result matters more to you than trying to extract the top bidder’s full limit.

Select Date Sale®

Here is the mechanic, in plain terms.

The property is listed with a from-price or a price range, chosen at listing. Buyers register their interest and inspect. When an offer arrives that you are prepared to consider, every registered buyer is told that an offer is on the table and invited to submit their best and final.

They are not told the amount of that offer. They are not told your reserve. They are not told what anyone else has put forward. And there is one round only, so if their offer is the one you choose, they cannot be outbid afterwards.

We do not counter-offer. Counter-offers invite a haggle, and a haggle usually moves the seller down rather than the buyer up. If an offer is not the one, we say so and let the buyer decide whether to come back stronger.

The date is yours. It might be tomorrow if a strong offer arrives early. It might be three weeks away. If no offer reaches a level you are prepared to accept, the home stays on the market. There is no artificial deadline. The trade-off, and it is worth naming, is that unlike auction the accepted offer can still carry conditions, so you gain flexibility and a wider buyer pool but give up the guaranteed unconditional finish auction delivers when it reaches reserve.

More than 730 sellers across the Perth Hills and Foothills have sold this way since 2015.

What the difference actually looks like

A recent Perth Hills home drew five offers. The best was just over $1.86 million. The second best was around $1.82 million.

Now run the same buyers through an auction. The underbidder stops at roughly $1.82 million. The winning bidder takes it at the next increment, call it $1.825 million. The seller banks around $35,000 less.

I want to be careful here, because the honest version matters more than the impressive one. Those same buyers might have bid differently in a room. Nobody can run both processes on the same house. But the gap between first and second is the money a bidding contest hands back to the winner, and in that sale it was real. That is the point of the example, not a promise that every seller will see the same gap.

It is also not always $35,000. Sometimes the top two offers are $2,000 apart and the method makes almost no difference at all.

Where Select Date Sale® is the wrong choice

If there is only one interested buyer, it does nothing. Competition you do not have cannot be created by a process. In a quiet market, or on a home with a narrow buyer pool, you are better off negotiating hard with the one buyer you have.

If your home is easy to price and there are five near-identical recent sales in the street, the extra process is probably not earning its keep.

If you want a binding, unconditional result the day the hammer falls, and you are confident the bidding will reach reserve, auction gives you that certainty and this does not.

And if you would rather counter-offer and haggle, this is not for you, because we do not.

The question to ask any agent

Not

“what price will you put on my home”.

Ask this instead:

If three buyers want my home, what exactly will you do to make sure each one submits their strongest position?

Then listen for a process. A specific sequence of steps. If you get adjectives instead of a mechanic, be careful, because that is where the money is made or lost, and it happens after the photos are done and the sign is up.

Frequently asked questions

Is auction or private treaty better for selling a house?

Neither is better in the abstract; it depends on your property and your buyers. Auction can drive strong competition in a hot market and, if it reaches reserve, gives a binding unconditional result, but it excludes buyers who need finance, inspections or a subject-to-sale, and if bidding falls short the home passes in. Private treaty is simple and familiar but often collapses into a one-on-one negotiation with the first offer, so slower buyers never compete. Match the method to the home, not to what the agency prefers to sell.

What is a Select Date Sale®?

It is a method that lists with a from-price or range, then, when a genuine offer arrives, invites every registered buyer to submit one best-and-final offer without knowing the other offers or the reserve. There is one round, no counter-offers, and the sale date is set by when a strong offer lands rather than by an artificial deadline. It is designed to make interested buyers compete rather than letting the first mover negotiate alone.

Can I lose money selling at auction?

You can leave money on the table two ways. If bidding does not reach your reserve, the property passes in, you have paid for the campaign, and the market now knows it did not sell, which weakens your hand in the negotiation that follows. And even when it does sell, the winner only has to beat the underbidder by one increment, so the top bidder may pay less than their true limit. Auction has real strengths, but neither of those risks is small.

Which selling method gets the highest price in the Perth Hills?

The one that makes the most genuine buyers compete for your specific home. In a market where many buyers need conditions, forcing unconditional bidding can thin the field, while a method that keeps those buyers in and makes them compete can capture more. But if there is only one buyer, no process invents competition, and hard negotiation is the answer. The right method follows from the property and the buyer pool.

Selling in the Perth Hills or Foothills

Bedfordale, Roleystone, Kelmscott, Mount Nasura, Mount Richon and Seville Grove are not one market. An acreage block with a workshop and a valley outlook attracts a completely different buyer to a family home on a cottage block, and the right method follows from the property, not from what the agency prefers to sell.

I will tell you straight which of the three I think suits your home, including when the answer is not ours.

Book a free Perth Hills and Foothills property appraisal⁠, and read our Best Service Guarantee⁠.

Truth. Strategy. Sold.

About the author: Brendan Leahy has been selling homes throughout the Perth Hills and Foothills since 2002, with more than 1,500 personal sales. Learn more on Brendan Leahy’s author profile