For years, a rising market allowed real estate agents to get away with something Ben Collier believes is now coming back to bite them: they stopped paying enough attention to buyers.
Listings could be loaded onto the major portals, enquiries arrived, competition did much of the heavy lifting and the industry’s attention increasingly shifted towards winning the next vendor.
But as conditions become more challenging and buyers gain greater choice, The Agency co-founder says the agents who built their businesses around that model are discovering its limitations.
“If you’re an agent who relies on just putting it online and waiting for the market to come to you, then you’re going to find this challenging time that we are currently in even more profoundly challenging as the market gets harder,” Ben says.
His argument is not that the portals have stopped working, far from it, it is that they can no longer be the entire strategy.
And, somewhat counterintuitively for an industry currently consumed by AI, automation and efficiency, Ben believes part of the answer lies in going back to skills agents once took for granted: knowing buyers, picking up the phone, being physically present at inspections and understanding what is happening in a campaign beyond what the data says.
“I think the tools that we as agents relied upon in previous markets still remain and are important. However, we now have to look at other ways that extend well beyond the portals,” he says.
“What else can I be doing as an agent to add value to this process?”
The buyer problem the industry created
Ben points to the growth of the buyer’s agent sector as evidence of a gap selling agents allowed to develop.
“That, in my opinion, is due to selling agents ignoring the buyer, ignoring the purchaser,” he says.
“So the buyer’s agent has filled the gap in the market very successfully because selling agents have lost the art of just servicing those buyers and nurturing them because today’s purchaser is tomorrow’s vendor.”
That mattered less when stock was scarce and competition among buyers was fierce. Agents could concentrate heavily on prospecting for listings because, once they secured one, finding buyers was relatively straightforward.
Now Ben believes that equation is changing.
“Now that’s flipping on its head where there are more listings coming onto the market. Buyers are spoilt for choice by comparison, and that’s combined with there being no FOMO in the market at all.”
It means the database can no longer simply be a repository of names collected at open homes.
At Ben’s team meetings, prospective purchasers are discussed alongside current vendors and pipeline sellers. Their budgets, circumstances and requirements are continually updated because a buyer’s brief rarely remains static.
“Sometimes their price range has increased because they recognise that what it is that they want is gonna put them into a higher price point. Sometimes it’s even revised down,” he says.
“Their circumstances change a lot.”
Some buyers will transact quickly; others might remain in an agent’s orbit for several years, changing their expectations along the way.
“Sometimes it can be a year, two years, three years, whatever it ends up being.
“And over that two-year, three-year period, sometimes what they thought they wanted at the very beginning is refined over time. And that can actually lead to something completely different to where you started that journey.”
Portals can’t see compromise
There is another weakness in relying entirely on digital search, Ben argues: portals can only show consumers what they tell the algorithm they want.
Real buyers are considerably messier. Someone searching for a three-bedroom terrace with two bathrooms and parking, for example, might happily sacrifice the parking space for a larger home.
But if that property sits outside their selected filters, they may never see it.
“It’s invisible to them,” he says.
That is where an agent who genuinely understands the purchaser can create value that a search filter cannot.
Ben even sees an argument for traditional print in the current environment because it can put a property in front of someone who was not actively searching for it.
“If ever there was an argument, in my opinion, for print media, it’s now,” he says.
Winning the listing isn’t winning
The shift also changes the conversation agents need to have with vendors.
Ben is wary of blaming unrealistic seller expectations entirely on homeowners, arguing those expectations are often created by agents during the appraisal process.
“We’re seeing these big differences in the expectation that was provided to them by that agent to where the market now sits,” he says.
“So, yeah, they got the listing, but they’ve created a very big gap that in some instances is very difficult to close.”
“You can only just blame the market so far.”
His point is particularly relevant when winning an appraisal at an inflated price can create problems weeks later, when buyer feedback fails to support the original promise.
“No one’s smarter than the market by 20 per cent,” he says.
“The numbers don’t lie. The data doesn’t lie.”
In a slower market, he believes agents will increasingly be judged not simply on whether they sold a property, but on the quality of the result relative to genuinely comparable sales.
“People are now scrutinising that result and that outcome far more than in previous years.
“If you’re an agent who’s driven by the outcome as opposed to an agent who’s driven by securing a commission, all of a sudden, sales are going to stand out amongst others.”
Thirty years, one listing and a $23.5 million result
Few examples better illustrate Collier’s philosophy than his recent campaign for 127 Paddington St, Paddington.
His relationship with the property began in 1994 when, as a junior assistant to his then mentor, he helped introduce Walter and Carole Lamerton to the home.
Ben was young and keen, and over subsequent years would periodically contact Carole with prospective buyers.
“I would call Carole and say, ‘Oh, this really wealthy person wants to buy your house’,” he recalls.
“And she’d say, ‘Look. Why don’t you pop around and have a chat to me about it?’ And so I’d go around and see Carol, and we’d have a cup of tea.”
Each time, Ben thought it might finally be the moment she wanted to sell.
It wasn’t.
“Over time, I realised she wasn’t interested in selling because she loved living there,” he says.
But, even so, the conversations continued.
“It was a nice excuse for me to call her and maintain contact and be relevant with Carole for over three decades.”
After Carole died, that relationship ultimately resulted in Ben being appointed to sell the property without a competitive pitch.
“I listed that house completely uncontested because I had this long connection and association with the family that there was no one else that was going to list that house … and many people tried over the years.”
But securing the listing was only the beginning.
Ben points to another unusual advantage: having last traded before internet property portals became ubiquitous, he says the property had virtually no digital sales history.
“When they bought that house in 1994, this is prior to the introduction of the Internet in real estate using the portals.
“So there’s no digital footprint of this house anywhere up until just now.”
Rather than treating that absence as a problem, the campaign leaned into the mystery surrounding the home.
Ben’s team released teaser reels on social media over the course of a week without initially identifying the address, building towards the property’s full launch and accompanying media coverage.
This was also something Ben generally avoids: “I hate appearing in videos,” he says.
But with a three-decade connection to the property and its owners, he eventually concluded there was nobody else who could authentically tell its story.
“In the end, I came to a conclusion that I had to just suck it up because the only person that can actually tell that story was me.”
The response exceeded his expectations.
“I wasn’t quite expecting the viral response that we got from it. I knew it was going to intrigue people, but we had something like 57 or 58,000 people watch the video.”
Ben says the property sold before its scheduled auction for $23.5 million, with five active contract holders during the campaign.
“To say that’s a luxury at the moment is an understatement,” he says.
But the lesson he takes from the campaign is not that every agent should start producing teaser reels or cinematic property videos.
It is that every property requires the agent to work out what they can add that a portal listing alone cannot.
“Behind these front facades of these homes, there’s a story,” he says. “It’s not just another house. Certainly isn’t for the people who own it or who live there.
“As an agent, you must add value to the process. You’re not there to just take names and stand at the front.”
Get back to the coalface
Ben believes the same principle applies to the way agents run campaigns.
As agents become more successful and teams grow, there can be a temptation to delegate more of the work that originally made them successful.
He questions whether that works in the current market.
“I think as someone becomes more successful, they can along the way forget what made them special in order for them to become successful,” he says.
For Ben, that means being physically present.
“For me, I find the whole process of a sales campaign a very tactile one. For you to have a really good assessment on how you’re going, you really need to be front and centre and right in the middle of it.”
“You’ve got to be at the coalface. You’ve got to be on the tools.”
That includes attending open homes rather than relying entirely on junior team members to relay what happened.
“You can get away with that in a market with high degrees of FOMO and in a rising market, but you can’t do that here in this current market that we find ourselves in in this part of the cycle.”
The same thinking applies to vendor communication.
While digital reporting, messages and WhatsApp groups have their place, Ben still advocates sitting down with vendors face to face and talking through what has happened during the previous week.
“I’ve seen people hide behind emails and hide behind text messages when I say, just pick up the phone and call them,” he says.
“Sitting down face to face, you can’t hide in those meetings. You’re delivering warts and all exactly what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing between each meeting.”
An email cannot show an agent a client’s body language or allow them to hear a change in tone.
“There’s so much that has to be considered and observed and, more importantly, listened to for you to have a true assessment of what’s actually going on at that time.”
Technology changed. People didn’t
Ben started selling real estate in the early 1990s, when he recalls interest rates sitting at 18 per cent and relationships with buyers being critical to getting deals done.
“The agent who had the strongest relationship with that purchaser” was often the one who got the transaction over the line, he says.
Three decades later, despite enormous technological change, he believes that basic equation remains.
“The most disruptive thing that has occurred to our industry in the time that I’ve been selling is the introduction of the Internet,” he says.
But years of property price growth and strong demand also made it easier to overlook some of the industry’s fundamental skills.
“These year-on-year gains has meant that we’ve ignored the art of servicing and looking after people.”
AI presents the industry with another extraordinary efficiency opportunity, but Ben’s concern is not the technology itself. It is what happens when agents use technology to avoid conversations they should be having themselves.
“People don’t want to feel as though they’re dealing with a robot, with the same dialogue because you’ve heard it on some motivational tape or something along those lines,” he says.
“At the end of it, they want to deal with a human who cares or empathises with why it is they need to buy that house, and you’re doing everything in your power to help them.”
For vendors, Ben believes the ultimate assessment of an agent comes down to two questions their friends and family will eventually ask.
“Are you happy with the price? And what was the experience like?”
“Those two things must go hand in hand.”
Purchasers remember their experience too – something agents ignore at their own expense when today’s unsuccessful buyer may become tomorrow’s vendor.
The four buyers who missed out on 127 Paddington Street, for example, did not simply disappear from Ben’s radar.
“We’re doing our very best to house them,” he says.
“People don’t mind missing out provided it was a fair playing field.”
Because in a market where every transaction requires more work, he does not believe there is a new piece of technology, prospecting script or marketing trick that will suddenly provide the answer.
“There is not one magic thing that if you do that, it’s going to lead to success. It’s a whole host of things.”
“It’s every touch point. It’s the experience for the vendor. It’s the experience for the purchaser. It’s heightened transparency. It’s high-level communication. It’s reporting. And, like, it’s everything.”
And as the market becomes less forgiving, that may be precisely the point.