“During the first months of 2014, while the real estate is still affected by one of the most hard times of history, we are facing ourselves to some owners who are not able to perfectly understand how important is the entering of a property into the market. So, once again, two negotiations are in standby due to some urbanistic problems. Every time, during our property acquisition, we ask the owners a due diligence, which has to be created by a trusted specialist of them. The most common answers are: “once we have a buyer, I will do it” or “my property is perfectly in compliance with any regulation”. Often, we are not able to make them understand our will, which is not the one of make the vendors waste their time and money, but preventing any eventual problem.”
This wants Stefano Petri, the Great Estate & Chesterton CEO, poured out while describing the powerlessness of the group towards those vendors who do not understand the importance of a property technical report before its sale or, at least, the knowledge of the possible solutions.
“Since we created this group, we had always tried to make the clients understand the importance of the initial verifications, which have to be done before the entering of the property into the market. Until some years ago, being the demand high, there were no problems for the supply. For this reason, even if I did have never agree with this modality, this behaviour has been tolerated thanks to market too.”
In so hard times for this sector, selling a property is not so easy, things change and, precisely for this reason:
“The non-investment of time and money for this kind of verification is, to today, something which will highly compromise the positive end of a negotiation. Indeed, in this way, all the efforts aimed to find the right buyer done, as well as the advertisement and professionals’ time used will be useless. In this days, we are negotiating two important properties, one in Umbria and the other in Tuscany, both requested by international clients, but some urbanistic discrepancies which we ignored are jeopardizing the negotiations. If we had knew it before, we would have said it to the buyer without any problem. Sometimes, I think that our methodology may be too strict, but when those situations happen, and precise in the interest of the vendors, I am even more sure about its validity.”
