The most valuable thing 23 years taught me: how to say no

Compiled from: Dear Cape Town Documentary - Official Episode @hardieproperty

A while back I drove away from a valuation in Camps Bay without the mandate.

I hadn't lost it. I'd turned it down.

The client is someone I've known for about six years. He has been supportive of Hardie Property from the day I set it up, he's come to me for advice ever since, and he'd asked me to put a value on his property. That is about as warm as a lead gets in Cape Town.  I sat in the car afterwards and told him I wasn't the right agent for it.

I can't tell you what the property is. It's significant enough that if I gave you the tiniest detail every agent in Cape Town would know exactly which one I mean, and that's not mine to hand out. But I can tell you why I said no, because that decision is the single most useful thing 23 years has given me, and it is not the thing anyone expects.

What actually disqualified me

It was being sold as a going concern.

Lots of rooms, real trading history, financials that a buyer would need to interrogate line by line. Which makes it a business that happens to have a building attached, not a house.

Residential is what I know. Apartments, houses, estates, that is where I have spent 23 years. But this is actually a business, and you've got to look at financials etc. There are people who do that type of property specifically, all day, and that's not me.

So I said no.

Now the uncomfortable bit

I could probably have sold it.

That's the funny thing. If that property came to market I've got the contacts and I know the kind of buyer, so I would know where to start looking. So the deal wasn't out of reach. I could have taken it on, put a number on it, and very possibly got away with it.

But "can I move this" and "should I be the one advising on what it's worth" are two completely different questions, and the whole discipline sits in the gap between them.

Selling is a network problem. Valuing is a competence problem. I had the first one and not the second, and the client doesn't get to see which is which. He just gets a number from a man he trusts.

At the end of the day that number is somebody's biggest financial decision of the decade. Getting it wrong isn't a bad month for me, it's a bad year for him.

What I would have done at twenty-five

I walked in and said it was amazing.

I'm not being unkind about newer agents here, because this is exactly what I'd have done, and I'd have done it with total confidence. You go in, you love the property, you want the listing, you want to be the person who got it. Then you sit down to actually value the thing and you really struggle, and you may or may not land on the right figure.

And here's the part nobody warns you about: even if you get the mandate, you then struggle again, because you haven't got the contacts and you haven't got the people. So now you're sitting on a property you can't price and can't place, with a client phoning you every Friday.

Invariably that's how it goes. It's not a character flaw, it's just the order things arrive in. Nobody hands you judgement at the start. You get enthusiasm first and judgement much, much later, and for the first decade you don't know the difference between them.

A no is not a lost client

This is the bit that surprised me most.

I don't care whether I've known you for two minutes or I've known you for twenty years, I'll always help people out, because you never know when it's going to come back around to you. So saying "I'm not your man for this" isn't the end of the conversation, it's the start of a better one. I could tell him roughly where the value sat. I could tell him the type of agent he needed. I could point him at people who'd do it properly.

He got something more useful than a mandate holder. He got an honest opinion from someone with no stake in the answer.

And a client you were straight with is the client who refers you to the next client. Look, I'm not doing it as a tactic. But it is what happens.

And then the right one turns up

Same month, different story.

I got asked to value a house in an estate in Hout Bay. A British couple, found me through Instagram, invited me into their home. I hadn't called them. I hadn't pestered them. They called me.

They'd already had a couple of valuations and the spread between them was six million rand. Six million. For the same house, in the same month.

So I was very clear with them. When I give a figure I'm quite cautious, and it's generally not to get the property for a mandate. If you decide you'd like to use me, we discuss a price and we do it together.

Because buying a mandate with an optimistic number is the exact mirror image of taking on a job you shouldn't take on. Both put the agent's interests ahead of the answer the client actually needs.

So what does experience actually buy you?

Twenty-three years hasn't made me an expert on more things. If anything, the list of things I'll put my name to has got shorter, not longer.

What it has given me is the ability to look at something genuinely attractive, in a market that is absolutely flying, from a client I like, and say: not this one, not me.

That's not modesty. It's the most commercially useful skill I own.

Richard Hardie is the founder of Hardie Property, a boutique agency operating across the prime areas of Cape Town.