Open days can be a bit hit and miss in Byron Bay. Over half of our buyers come from out of town and can’t make it to open days. At the open days themselves I often see the same faces cruising around – professional tire kickers.
Of course, during holiday season open days are great. Plenty of people get bitten by the Byron Bay bug and come along to open days to check out the Byron Bay Property Market. We are talking Byron bay, so we get plenty of colorful characters coming along to open days…. But one recent family was… more colorful than usual.
They were clearly tourists but they seemed very serious. Would classify them as Rippies(Rich form hippies)I chatted with them for a while and they said they’d been to numerous open days but had not found a house with the right layout. I was sure this would be the one. Ocean views, multiple balconies, curved walls like waves matching the curved coast line. Perfect. They seemed to love the place and were still there at the end when everyone else had left. Then they asked if they could spend 5 minutes in the house alone with their children. I saw no real issue with this, I had some phone calls to make and went out the front to the driveway.
Taking on my mobile a few minute later I realised that the 5 minutes were being used…. rather intimately. There were muffled groans and bumping noises come from the master bedroom whose window overlooked the driveway. Stunned, I did not know what to do. Clearly, this was inappropriate behavior but I didn’t want to walk in on it. I decided to leave them to it and give them a lecture when they emerged.
2 minutes later, they did… looking not quite as flushed and ruffled as I would have expected…. Though the 13 year old daughter was clearly flustered and red in the face. I wondered for a moment if it had been a set up. The man motioned me over and explained what was going on. Apparently, their 13 year old daughter was constantly complaining about the “noises” coming from their bedroom in Sydney where they lived in a house with poor sound muffling and with the master bedroom close to the smaller ones. She had requested a house with better noise insulation, and with a master bedroom far removed from the children’s rooms. The couple were demonstrating to their 13 year old how sound proof the house was – through a simulation. Apparently the test was successful, though less so when the two Rippies pretended to move the simulation to the kitchen, then the lounge room, then the hallway…!
They did not end up buying the house, but I was able to find them another which was perfect. Solid floors, insulated walls, master bedroom at the end of the house, great acoustics, no sound travelling at all from one end to the other.
I guess the lesson here is, as a Vendor, there are sometimes Buyer requirements that are not spoken about…. but which you could well benefit from thinking about in any case. Fix those squeaky bedroom floorboards and install that wall insulation. It will add to the presentation value of your home and will address some issues that are probably not going to be raised directly.