Offers over $900,000 is not a price. It is a starting line, and occasionally not even that.
Interstate buyers in particular find Queensland campaigns confusing, because the conventions here are genuinely different.
Nundah is a good place to see it play out.
The suburb draws first home buyers, downsizers, young families and investors all at once, so competition arrives from several directions and the marketing reflects that.
Why Queensland campaigns look different
In Queensland, a property being taken to auction cannot be advertised with a price. No guide, no range, no number at all. That is a rule about how auction properties are marketed, and it means the absence of a price tells you nothing about value.
Outside of auction, agents are free to advertise however they choose, which is how you end up with offers over, for sale by negotiation, contact agent, expressions of interest and best and final all appearing in the same week for similar homes. These are marketing decisions, not valuations.
Offers over, and what sits behind the number
An offers over figure is usually set below where the seller expects to land.
That is the point of it. It widens the pool, gets people through the door, and creates competition.
How far below varies enormously. Sometimes it is close to the mark. Sometimes the seller has no intention of accepting anything near it. The number reflects a strategy agreed between an agent and a seller, and that strategy exists to serve the seller. Which is fair enough, because that is who the agent works for.
The useful question is not what the listing says. It is what the seller will actually accept, and how motivated they are to accept it.
Why the listed number is not evidence
We see buyers anchor to an advertised figure and then feel stung when a home sells well above it. The figure was never evidence of value. Comparable sales are.
What a similar home on a similar block in a similar condition sold for in the past few months is real information. An advertised starting point is a conversation opener. Treating the second as though it were the first is how buyers either overpay out of panic or lose homes they could have comfortably afforded.
How to work out what a home is actually worth
Start with recent settled sales rather than current listings, because listings tell you what people are asking, not what anyone paid. Adjust for land size, aspect, position in the street, condition and any overlays that affect what can be done with the site.
Then form your own number before you speak to the agent about price, and know why you arrived at it. A view you can defend is a view that holds up when the campaign gets busy.
What this looks like in Nundah
Nundah moves quickly. The village, the train line and the airport access make it work for a broad range of buyers, and homes that present well and are priced to attract interest tend to gather several parties fast.
In that environment, the buyers who do best are rarely the ones who react hardest to the advertised figure. They are the ones who worked out their own number early, understood the seller's position, and put a clean, credible offer forward with terms that made it easy to say yes.
If you are trying to read a campaign and work out what a home is genuinely worth, we are always happy to have a conversation.
Written by Jack Freestone, Buyers Collective