A Sydney father of two has secured his dream family home at an unbeatable price after engaging Lauren Jones Buyers Agency.

Having grown up in rural New South Wales before relocating to Sydney, Harry lacked the property literacy he needed to find a suitable home for his family of four. As well, amid Australia’s nationwide cost-of-living crisis, 3-bedder lower north shore Sydney properties had inflated to around $3 million. Without the market knowledge or hefty wallet needed to buy in his region, Harry was forced to begin searching in Brisbane–yet another market he struggled to navigate.

“Sydney was just too expensive,” Harry recalls. “We didn’t even have the borrowing capacity. But, up in Brisbane we did…I just didn’t know the Brisbane market. We were looking at places up here that other people had recommended to us. However, [they weren’t guaranteed to be] a good buy that actually suited our family… Your mates down at the pub don’t really know.”

How could engaging a buyers agent help?

Enlisting the helping hand of a trusted Brisbane buyer’s agent became Harry’s only option. He turned to Lauren Jones Buyers Agency (LJBA) for guidance, which didn’t disappoint.

“The process was good. You just give Lauren a brief and off she goes,” Harry shares. “We were on a time crunch as well, because we had to vacate our property in Sydney. We had 90 days to work, get a deposit, find properties. All we needed was one trip to Brisbane to look around because [Lauren had] lined everything up.”

Harry believes he wouldn’t have been able to pull it off himself, due to his inability to take time away from his business, as well as not understanding the Brisbane property market. Ultimately, his relief from engaging LJBA boiled down one key point of logic: you just don’t know what you don’t know.

“I have friends who’ve been spending 6-12 months looking for property. The money they would have spent on a buyer’s agent they would have ‘5-timed’ already just being in the property market … We’ve made back that fee 5 times, 10 times, in the last 12 months. These are people that want to do their own research and be comfortable—and that’s fine. A buyer’s agent doesn’t replace that, but you just don’t know what you don’t know.

Harry admits that “to really compete in [the Brisbane] market, you need a buyer’s agent now. It is their job to know stuff that other people can’t find on Google. And some of these properties you can’t even find on realestate.com. By the time it’s there, it’s already overpriced.”

An unexpected hurdle of the process became Harry’s issues with the mortgage process. Once his wife and him chose a property, the bank and mortgage broker they had been working with fell through. “We had to go direct,” Harry explains. “And that was through Lauren’s contacts that we got to do that. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have the property. So, it’s not just find the property, it’s making sure that you actually get to secure it at the end.”

Did engaging a buyer’s agent pay off in the end?

Since LJBA successfully secured the property within a 3-week turnaround, Harry has enjoyed being a happy homeowner. His family of four, alongside their beloved canine companions, now reside just thirty minutes out from Brisbane’s CBD. Their home is a gorgeous 5-bedder that Harry believes is around 70% cheaper than the less practical housing options he had been looking at in Sydney.