In fact, there’s a small sub-set of investors who pick up shabby properties that have been poorly marketed by estate agents (where demand is low), then stick them straight into auction (where demand is high) without doing anything to them at all. Their profit margin comes from the fact that amateur auction buyers will unwittingly bid more than they’d have paid by just buying through an estate agent – because they assume that because it’s in auction and looks like a bit of a wreck it must be a bargain. For disciplined and serious investors, this is the major problem with auctions: you can set
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