In a real estate landscape currently defined by shifting economic headwinds and regulatory friction, Victoria’s property market has felt distinctly more challenging than many of its interstate counterparts.
Yet, amid a climate marked by hesitation, Victorian independent powerhouse Jellis Craig has quietly breached a significant milestone: 10,000 transactions in a single financial year.
For a group that was transacting roughly 5,000 properties just five years ago, the result reflects a doubling of its footprint.
This growth trajectory has been driven by a deliberate strategy of technology investment, calculated mergers and acquisitions, and a cultural emphasis on emotional regulation.
While the five-figure transaction milestone makes for a compelling industry headline, Jellis Craig CEO Andrew McCann is quick to frame it as the outcome of long-term business mechanics rather than a sudden surge in market conditions.
“I think the milestone just is a great demonstration of a number of things,” he says. “It demonstrates the growth that we’ve enjoyed across the Victoria marketplace over a number of years, which comes about from a long list of strong mergers and acquisitions and great performance from the professionals that represent our brand every day.”
The trajectory has been steep; after hovering around 9,500 sales the previous year, the network knew the 10,000 mark was within reach.
However, rather than positioning it as a high-pressure internal target, leadership deliberately kept the focus elsewhere.
“It’s probably a target and a metric that we look at as a group, but we haven’t really spoken about it to our team. We celebrate the successes of our clients, and we celebrate the success that we have in our marketplaces and our communities, so the milestone in itself, is a milestone that we’ve only really made our group aware of.
“It hasn’t been a target or anything that we’ve wanted to make too much noise about because it doesn’t sit true with our culture.”
Despite this understated approach, the velocity of growth is undeniable.
“By real estate standards, we have been on a fairly aggressive growth path over the past four, five years,” Andrew says.
“It’s only now if we look back five years ago, we were selling 5,000 properties at that stage. So we’ve had significant growth through this window.”
Growth at this scale requires significant infrastructure and Andrew says the network’s ability to handle the increased volume comes down to two key levers: talent acquisition and a unified digital ecosystem.
Last year alone, the group expanded by more than 450 people, driven largely by independent agencies choosing to integrate into the brand.
“We’ve been fortunate enough to have other businesses see Jellis Craig as an attractive place to park their future,” he says.
Supporting this expanding workforce is an open technology infrastructure across the group’s 45-office footprint.
Unlike traditional franchise models where data is siloed by territory, Jellis Craig operates a unified database of more than 2,800,000 Victorian contacts.
“As an open system, it means that we’ve got one customer and one customer profile that’s available for every agent to see,” he says.
“We believe that we have a lot of power in the knowledge that we can gain from the tracking of people’s performance in the market, what properties they’re looking at across our footprint, what they’re bidding on, and then helping to progress them as a buyer or a seller.”
Redefining the vendor relationship
A key part of this technology stack is its proprietary vendor portal, designed to shift the relationship between agent and client from curated reporting to full transparency.
Sellers are provided with live, benchmarked visibility into campaign performance across Jellis Craig’s website, Realestate.com.au, and Domain, along with real-time buyer feedback and open-home data.
For the business, the benefits are twofold.
Operational efficiency is one: “It speeds up our agents in that they don’t have to focus on sending emails and reporting. They need to focus on the relationships that they’re having with their client and the buyers that are in the marketplace.”
Strategic alignment is another: “For a long time, agents have probably traded on the idea that their knowledge is the power. And I think that the world is moving towards understanding that the data tells the story. Owners, we’re on the same team as our owners… when you’ve got good information, you make decisions confidently.”
Navigating a challenging market
Victoria’s property market has presented a choppy environment for agents over the past 12 to 18 months; Andrew’s directive to his team, however, centres on what he calls “emotional regulation.”
“The market is the market that you deal in every day. And whether that’s a good market, an indifferent market, a challenging market, they’re the conditions of play for our team,” he says. “One of the things that I’d say we always focus on is being in control of what we can control.”
He also acknowledges that the broader industry often romanticises easier conditions.
“There’s no industry that wants life to be easier than the real estate industry, and we’ve had it easy for a long time. The market’s been going really well for a long period of time, so when you get hit with challenge, you’ve gotta knuckle down a bit. And so we did that well.”
To support this, leadership development across the group goes beyond traditional financial metrics, focusing instead on behavioural performance and mindset.
“A lot of that coaching is often about how to make sure that you are turning up with value and regulating your emotions so that you’re creating the best impression upon your people as well as your customers that you’re meeting on a day-to-day basis.”
Looking forward, Andrew says Jellis Craig is not slowing down. The group is already working to evolve its static data infrastructure into a more dynamic, predictive system using emerging AI capabilities to better understand buyer and seller behaviour before they reach the active market.
“We see the next 12 months as a great opportunity for us to get better. We have a strong mindset for improvement and continual improvement,” he says.
“So I think that we assume that we’ll skip past 11,000 and head straight towards 12,000 transactions and that we won’t vary from the path that we’ve chosen to be on. So far, it’s been working well for us.”