Picky buyers sit tight

If you are planning to sell your house in the pre-Christmas season, you should know about a hard-to-please group of buyers out there. Be warned, they will wait patiently - up to 12 months - for vendors to get really desperate before making an offer, and they are looking for bargains.

This recalcitrant bunch can be separated into three groups:

People returning from overseas with their foreign currency;

Baby boomers looking for investment properties for their retirement, who do not expect to buy until the next property cycle;

Independent thinkers who want to avoid the enormous mortgages which they think have restricted their friends' lives.

Would-be buyers who arrived within the last year with British pounds, US dollars or another foreign currency are not happy. When they got here the dollar was higher than they expected so they didn't convert their money, expecting the dollar to fall.

But, instead of going down, the NZ dollar is rising, hitting a historic high this week of US71.51 cents, and there is no end in sight.

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