When Victoria announced fresh underquoting reforms and New South Wales lifted maximum fines from $22,000 to $110,000, Barry Plant CEO Lisa Pennell did not rush to complain about red tape.
What worries her more is something else entirely: that an industry already ranked as Australia’s least trusted profession is still trying to police a complex problem with old-fashioned methods, while the technology that could actually fix it sits in the background, largely underused.
“There’s a simple solution, my friend,” she says.
“And I’ve been banging on about this for a while, and it is AI. And it’s not about changing legislation. It’s actually about enforcement.”
The “Gestapo at the edge of the auction” problem
At the moment, much underquoting enforcement still looks like a scene from another era.
Regulators turn up at auctions, request files, cross-check quote ranges and comparable sales, and try to determine whether the evidence matches what was advertised.
Lisa does not dispute that compliance work needs to be done, but she questions whether this version of it is helping.
“Instead of employing more government workers to run out to auctions and collect files from real estate agents and, you know, stand like the Gestapo at the edge of the auction, freaking everybody out and making customers feel like agents are untrustworthy, I’d invest in AI,” she says.
The irony, in her view, is that the raw material for something better already exists.
Statement of Information data, comparable sales, listing ranges and eventual sale prices are captured every day across portals and CRMs; they’re just not stitched together into a live enforcement system.
“We’re already logging SOIs and the comparable sales that sit within them, but at the moment that information is just a downloadable file on the portals, she says.
“All of that data is sitting there, and AI could easily assess whether the comparables are appropriate.”
From paper tax returns to pre-fill, but for real estate
To explain what she has in mind, Lisa reaches for an example almost everyone can understand: the humble tax return.
She remembers the days of carbon copy forms, adding up interest from multiple bank accounts, chasing Medicare statements and hoping the maths stacked up.
Today, much of that work is redundant. Employers, banks and health funds report directly, and the system pre-fills a large chunk of the return.
“So there’s no way to understate those things in your tax return,” she says.
“Likewise, it makes zero sense to me why regulators are not enforcing using technology.”
In her view, a modern underquoting enforcement system would:
- Ingest SOIs, quote ranges, comparables and sale prices automatically, rather than relying on agents emailing or uploading documents on request.
- Use AI to assess the validity of comparables – are they genuinely similar in size, condition and location, or stretched to justify a more aggressive range.
- Flag patterns at an agent level – where a one-off result above the range is normal, but eight out of ten might point to a systemic problem.
“Is the sale price relevant to the range? And is there a pattern?” she says.
“Do we have agents where going over the range is a genuine one-off, say, one in twenty. Or are we seeing others where eight out of ten sales end up over? That’s the difference we should be able to see.”
For her, this is exactly what AI should be doing.
“This is what we should use technology for,” she says.
“Not to come between us and the customer, but to enforce, to build trust, and to make the customer experience better.”
AI for propensity, not just policing
Part of Lisa’s frustration is seeing how comfortably the industry embraces AI and data when it suits sales, while dragging its feet when the same tools could be used to protect consumers.
“There’s so many different proptechs that are all about propensity modelling. How do we find the vendor at the point where they’re about to sell?” she says.
She is not against that, but she is clear about where the boundary should sit.
“That AI will never tell you why that customer wants to sell. That AI will never tell you what that customer is feeling or how to interact,” she says.
“You don’t want to put AI between that and the customer. So it is a valid use of AI, propensity modelling, but communication via AI is not.”
Who is actually reporting underquoting
One of the more uncomfortable threads Lisa pulls on is where underquoting complaints come from.
Agents often imagine that regulators are flooded with angry buyers who have missed out on homes and are looking for someone to blame.
Those consumers are definitely present, especially when they’ve outlaid money on building and pest reports with nothing to show for it.
But that is not the whole story.
“One of the problems with underquoting is that it is mostly agents reporting other agents, and we can all see who’s doing it and when they’re doing it,” she says.
She refers to figures she has seen that show a sizeable portion of complaints are actually initiated by agents themselves.
For Lisa, that speaks to an industry problem bigger than underquoting alone: an entrenched lack of trust not just from the public, but inside the profession.
“Again, this is where the lack of trust come into play … the wider consumer does not trust us because we don’t trust each other,” she says.
The “simple solve” government has not taken
If governments are serious about protecting buyers from wasting money, she believes there is another lever that has been oddly ignored: mandatory building and pest reports.
“When consumers complain, it’s generally through that sunk cost,” she says.
“They’ve spent money on building and pest, you know, for no reason in their opinion… There’s a simple solve for that. Make it mandatory. Why are we not doing that?”
Early in her tenure, she asked around to see whether the industry could at least build some sort of shared solution if regulators were concerned about how to structure it. She could not get widespread agreement.
“There was a variety of reasons given why not,” she says.
“Some groups were willing to do it… but there was a few that were concerned that a building report might make the property more difficult to sell if it exposed defects, which concerned me greatly, that response.”
Others feared that if they took on the cost and responsibility while competitors did not, they would lose listings.
“Again, this is where the lack of trust [shows up],” she says. “We’re all fighting for the listing.”
Collaboration, or at least a rising tide
When asked what an industry-wide solution could look like, Lisa returns to a theme that runs through much of her thinking: the sector’s inability to work together for longer than a moment.
“I think, you know, the one thing our industry has never done effectively on an ongoing basis is collaborate,” she says.
She can point to rare exceptions: a couple of election campaigns and the Beyond the Bricks fundraiser she helped lead during the 2019 bushfires, where brands put their logos aside and did something concrete for communities in need.
“You know, we spend so much energy and time undermining each other at the appraisal table to get the deal,” she says.
“I just think we’re our own worst enemy in some ways. And I’d love to see more positive collaboration because we are a collective. We’re viewed as a collective.”
In the absence of that, her focus at Barry Plant is to “raise the tide” within her own network and show that a different standard is possible.
Rules, reputation and the person at the table
For all the talk of laws, AI and industry politics, Lisa comes back to something more basic: personal responsibility.
“Rules are rules,” she says. “But the reality is that we should be a pack. It comes down to the decision that each and every salesperson makes when they’re sitting at the table with the customer, and that’s about doing the right thing.”
When she sees behaviour in the broader market that upsets her, she says she has learnt not to fixate on it.
“I do get upset about things I see, and then I go back to my tunnel vision of what I’m trying to achieve here,” she says.
“I don’t want to be distracted by people doing the wrong thing … we continue to step forward doing the right thing.”
In that sense, the underquoting debate is not just about fines and systems, but about the sort of leadership the profession is prepared to accept.
“It’s very convenient for leaders to accept poor behaviour from top performers because they write a lot of money,” she says.
“We don’t do that here. We will not tolerate poor behaviour. It doesn’t matter if you write 50k or 5 million.”
