He started as a junior leasing agent banking the Saturday rent money, went on to build two national sales forces, and now leads around 900 people at The Agency. After going back through the archives for the wisdom of Chris Hanley, Samantha McLean kept digging – and found eleven conversations with Matt Lahood spanning 2017 to 2024, adding up to one of the deepest people-leadership playbooks in Australian real estate – most of it built in markets at least as hard as this one. Here is some solid gold from Matt Lahood.
Matt Lahood runs a real estate business of roughly 900 people, and he doesn’t have a desk.
He hasn’t had one for more than 20 years, in any office. No desk means he has to walk the floor – and the floor is where the information is. He walks it daily, watching for what he calls the black cloud over someone’s head. When he spots one, they go for a coffee.
That one detail tells you most of what you need to know about how the co-founder and CEO of The Agency leads. He came up as a junior leasing agent in the late eighties, collecting rents and banking $30,000 in cash on a Saturday night. At McGrath he built a salesforce from 15 agents to 300.
His thesis, held across both brands and every market since: people join a business for the leadership, and they stay for it too. “I’ve had the same people with me ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen years. Even when I changed brands and things, people followed.”
Matt has sat down with me eleven times between 2017 and 2024 – as far as I can tell, making him one of the most-interviewed people in the Elite Agent archive. He has led salespeople through every kind of market in that stretch – and an awful lot of what he had to say lands hardest in a market like this one, where stock is moving slowly and the easy deals aren’t walking in the door. So, fresh from doing this for Chris Hanley, I went back through every conversation and pulled out the lessons that don’t date.
Every word below is his, exactly as he said it. Here are 30 of the best.
On leading
1. Get rid of your desk. Fifteen-plus years without one, deliberately. The desk is where leaders hide; the floor is where you find out what’s happening while it’s still happening. His daily discipline is simply looking for “the black cloud” over someone’s head.
2. The coffee walk. Spot the cloud, buy the coffee. “They’re skipping back to work just by someone cared about having a coffee with them.” Why does something that small work? “There’s no substitute for care. You can’t coach Care Factor.”
3. Open with life, not listings. His one-on-ones start with “tell me what’s happening in your life” – and then he stops talking. “Ninety per cent of the time, I find this problem outside of real estate.” Solve the thing outside the office and the numbers inside it tend to sort themselves out.
4. You can’t lead from a control room. “This is not a business where you can be in a control room pushing buttons as a leader.” This is a people business, and problems age fast – if you’re hearing about one second-hand, it’s already two weeks old. The floor is the only place you catch things while they’re still fixable.
5. Become an expert at managing the hard people. When Matt was invited into management young, his father – a lifelong manager of big businesses – sat him down with one piece of advice: “Anyone can manage the easy people… you need to become an expert at managing the hard people.” Matt’s verdict, decades on: “I took that away thirty years ago when I started.”
6. Have the conversations nobody wants to have. His definition of leadership – and of elite selling. “What makes successful leaders, and I’ve studied a lot of them – they have the conversations that nobody wants to have.” The agent version: “The successful agents have the conversations with owners and buyers that other agents won’t have.” And have them in person, never by email.
7. Mentor, don’t mandate. A few years back, when it seemed like half the workforce was quitting or thinking about it, The Agency kept nearly everyone – and Matt is clear about why: “We’ve just listened to our people… dictators and mandates and all this sort of stuff finished in any business. People don’t wanna be dictated to. They need to be mentored and coached. That’s different.” When the work-from-home question came up, he put it to his property management team as a show of hands. The answer was flexibility, so that’s what they built – “we will adjust our retail space and our commercial space based on what you tell us” – less office, same people.
On the scoreboard
8. The industry’s scoreboard is missing things. His most distinctive idea, and it arrived years before wellbeing became a conference topic: “I get GCI, I get KPIs, I get EBITDA – I understand that’s a scoreboard. But we now need to add to that family, wellbeing, mental health, your health, fitness. I think there are extra KPIs we should be scoring on too.”
9. We’ve been looking at the wrong drivers. “We’ve looked at people trying to say you’re not making enough calls, you’re not doing enough door knocks, you’re not ringing your past clients, you’re not networking – when it’s you’re not going to the gym, you’re not spending time with your partner, you’re not looking after your kids, you’re not looking after your mental health. If I get them doing that, the other stuff’s going to follow.”
10. Money follows. It never leads. “I’m a real firm believer of that.” He said it in the episode he recorded with his son Luke – who had just started at the bottom of the business in leasing, interviewed and managed by someone other than his dad. “I’d rather they say that’s Luke Lahood rather than that’s Matt Lahood’s son.” It seems to have worked – Luke is still at The Agency today, running a leasing team.
11. GCI is a ‘falsified’ number. He calls it “the fake number in the industry” and wants an award for the most money left after twelve months instead. “It’s all about what you keep in this business, not what you make.” Even rent-roll multiples don’t escape: “Somebody struck a number.”
12. Don’t confuse your self-worth with your net worth. “I’ve seen too many agents focus on GCI… don’t confuse your self-worth with your net worth is one of my favourites.”
13. Rest beats revenue. He would rather lose a deal than burn out the person: “I’d rather agents take time off.” One of his best people burnt out, stepped away, and came back on one condition – three days a week, no more. He took the deal on the spot: “She’ll do five days’ worth of work in three.”
On the craft
14. The forehead test. Around one in five buyers at your open home is a vendor deciding who’ll sell theirs. So treat every buyer as if it’s written on their forehead: “I’m checking you out because I’m thinking of appointing an agent.”
15. Give every owner three prices. The valuation – “a cold, hard, heartless price” – the market price, and the emotional price. “It’s very hard to lose a listing when you give an owner three prices.”
16. The listing presentation is 80/20. “It’s 80 per cent the owner of the property and 20 per cent you.” Their plans, their timeframe, their past experience of selling, their favourite room, their street. Then, briefly, you.
17. Return the call. Matt’s wife goes through open homes under her maiden name and leaves her number. “Might get one return call out of 10 opens.” That’s the whole edge, sitting there unclaimed: ring people back.
18. Speed is a new currency. McDonald’s arrives in 20 minutes, an Uber in seven – and an agent a client is about to pay tens of thousands of dollars can’t come until Thursday week. “Our industry is disconnected from reality, isn’t it?”
19. Frequency builds trust. Calendar-invite the entire vendor communication cadence on the day you list, so the conversations are locked in before anything gets hard. Never put anything in a vendor report you haven’t already said out loud. And for everyone else in your world, his weekend micro-video market reports beat touching-base calls: “The consumer wants to choose whether they look at you or not rather than be forced to look at you.”
20. Never let a sale end at the sale. When one of his agents sold a home $100,000 over the owner’s hopes, Matt walked in the next morning – not with champagne, with the post-sale plan: video testimonial, letterbox drops, ring the neighbours on both sides, back through the buyer list. The agent texted him hours later, already doing it. Let every sale build your brand.
On the market
21. Hatch, match or dispatch. The three life events that drive real estate in every market, boom or bust. Rates move sentiment. Life moves houses.
22. Buyers aren’t seasonal. “They don’t wait for the flowers to come out.” He brings a physical calendar to the vendor’s kitchen table and plans backwards from Easter, holidays and elections – and he lists over Boxing Day, when whole families are together and browsing property portals. The traditional January shutdown? “Yesterday’s fish and chips.”
23. Be suspicious of booms. “We don’t want a boom realistically.” A boom flatters everyone, and that’s the trap – the laziest habits are formed in the strongest markets. A slower market is where the fundamentals get rewarded: the returned call, the honest price conversation, the properly worked pipeline.
24. Triage your listings. In a stalled market, pour the round-the-clock attention into the vendors who genuinely need to sell. As for the rest: “If you’ve got 10 listings and five of them the owners need to sell… just say to the other five, look, I’ll call you when the market comes back to where you wanna be.”
25. The Day One reframe. For any moment the market changes the rules on you – rates, legislation, buyer behaviour: imagine you were hired the day the rules changed. You’d have no baggage and nothing to mourn – you’d just get on with learning the new market.
On lasting
26. Friday, after twelve. For more than 20 years: no appointments after midday on Friday. He reviews the diary two weeks back – what didn’t I follow up? – then two weeks forward – what needs pre-planning? “It’s the best process I’ve ever done in my career.”
27. Would you hire yourself? The question he’s asked himself since day one in the industry, because every agent is the CEO of their own business. The unglamorous half of the answer: a June budget meeting with your accountant, every single year.
28. Pass the relevance test. You’ve no business leading, coaching or advising on something if you haven’t done it, you’re not doing it now, or you’re reading it from a textbook. He runs the test on himself: his own dollar-productive list is four things – helping agents close, helping them list, recruiting, and strategy. Everything else, he’s worked out he’s no longer relevant for, and delegates.
29. Keep turning up. In 2020, with the industry wondering if it could even trade, Matt rang his then 82-year-old father and asked if he’d ever seen anything like it. The advice that came back works in any market that’s testing you: in twelve months everyone will just be talking about it – you have to keep going.
30. Remember whose keys you hold. The lesson underneath all the others. “It’s the biggest decision people make in their life, and we get to hold the keys to that front door. The trust is phenomenal. You go down the local police station… the local sergeant, who would be considered one of the trusted people inside, doesn’t have the keys to someone’s front door. We do. We have the keys to someone’s hopes, dreams, life’s journey in our hands.”
There’s plenty more where these came from – including the story of a 13-year-old unloading trucks for his uncle’s $2 shop on the corner of Pitt and Park Streets, and the four words of advice that gave him the selling bug for life.
(But I’m saving those for the book.)