At AREC 2025, veteran real estate coach Josh Phegan delivered a masterclass in adaptability that cut straight to the heart of what’s challenging today’s agents. His message was simple but confronting: in an industry where change is the only constant, success belongs to those willing to serve every segment of the market, not just the one that feeds their ego.
Addressing a full room, Josh begins with the story of a once-successful agent whose numbers had sharply declined. The issue wasn’t interest rates or stock levels. It was attitude.
The agent had stopped taking on smaller listings, convinced they were no longer worth his time. According to Josh, that kind of thinking is costing agents business.
“He was only chasing high-end,” Josh said. “And he wouldn’t actually be able to sell one, two, or three-bedroom homes.”
The solution wasn’t a better market or more marketing. It was mindset.
“Don’t be too good to take money to actually make money.”
For Josh, this wasn’t just about one agent. It was a broader point about how agents position themselves in the market.
“When you think about your brand and what your position in … are you positioned to be the top end? Are you positioned to be in the low end? Are you middle?”
The problem wasn’t being in any particular segment – it was not knowing, or worse, refusing to serve the market that exists.
Despite what you think your brand represents, your business needs to be about serving every market. And in a world that’s changing by the minute, that consistency needs to be grounded in flexibility, not ego.
That theme carried through the rest of his talk. “We live in a brand new world,” he said.
“Every single day you wake up there’s some completely different you go and deal with.”
Josh wasn’t speaking in hypotheticals. He pointed to a recent moment when the Reserve Bank cut rates by 0.25 per cent and agents rushed to celebrate on social media.
But by the next morning, sentiment had flipped – buyers were being told they could borrow $100,000 less than expected.
“One minute it’s a rate drop and everyone’s cheering, the next minute borrowing capacity’s gone down by a hundred grand,” he said.
The whiplash was real, and so was the warning: “Uncertainty is the only thing to be certain of.”
Time, too, needs reframing. “How many weeks are there in a year?” he asked.
“There’s actually only 44.”
The rest, he explained, is chewed up by school holidays, public breaks and lulls. In a commission-based business, it’s not about how many weeks you work but how many results you produce.
“The zone is all about the power of the routine,” he said. When things go wrong? Regroup, list gratitudes, re-establish your calendar, and reset.
Further, Josh believes that while deep area expertise has always mattered, the tools to build it have changed dramatically, and now there’s no excuse not to be fully versed.
“Overnight, you actually can become an area expert,” he said, referring to AI tools like ChatGPT that now allow agents to generate suburb-level data in minutes.
He described using prompts to create comprehensive local profiles, identifying key streets, schools, cafés, doctors, transport routes, and even local churches and builders.
But local expertise isn’t just about knowing what’s around. It’s about understanding what your market is going through. He contrasted the slow churn of Bells Beach, where properties are taking over 180 days to sell, with the high demand and low stock environment of Balmain.
“You go to open for inspection at week 26. The only person that’s there is you and the candle,” he said of Bells Beach. Balmain, on the other hand, is “hardly having any challenges.”
He explained that the difference is due to macroeconomic factors like interest rate rises and cost-of-living increases.
Borrowing power has dropped by more than a third since April 2022, from $1 million to $622,000. At the same time, mortgage repayments on a million-dollar loan have jumped by over $2,400 a month.
“My life has not improved… but it’s now 66% more expensive to live the same life that I was actually living two years ago.”
If the external landscape is shifting, so too is internal motivation. Josh passionately spoke about the importance of understanding why people sell, not just that they do.
“Are these people happy? Distressed? Under pressure?”
“The bigger the problem, the faster they move.”
Through it all, Josh kept coming back to one thing: execution.
“You don’t get known for what you know. You get known for what you execute,” he said.
“If you want to do 30 sales and you’ve got a 75% clearance rate, you need to do 40 listings.”
He wrapped with a personal story, a photo of himself at age six, standing beside his dad at an auction.
Josh recalled how his father would play American motivational speaker Zig Ziglar’s cassette tapes in the car, calling it “University on Wheels.”
It was in those early years that Josh absorbed the lesson that now underpins everything he teaches: “You really can have everything you want in life if you just help enough people get what they want.”
