For much of the past decade, success in residential real estate often came down to momentum. In a rising market, buyers were plentiful, and listings frequently sold despite imperfections in pricing, process or follow-up.
Today’s market is different. Across Melbourne’s south-east, agents are navigating more cautious buyers, increasingly selective vendors and a growing need to justify every recommendation with evidence rather than optimism.
In response, many of the industry’s highest performers are changing the way they operate; rather than relying solely on traditional marketing campaigns, they’re focusing on database-led selling, deeper buyer engagement and more transparent conversations around value.
The rise of database-led selling
According to Ben Dax, Sales Director and Auctioneer at Woodards Carnegie, the shift has been gradual but significant and what was once considered an alternative sales strategy has become a core part of how many properties are brought to market.
“There are very few campaigns now that don’t start pre-portal,” he says.
“Most properties would have at least one or two inspections or up to two full weeks of a pre-market campaign with the idea of either selling or getting really good price feedback. Most vendors would be very happy to sell off-market prior to a campaign.”
The trend reflects changing priorities among vendors. While auction campaigns remain highly effective for many properties, particularly those attracting broad buyer competition, an increasing number of sellers are weighing the benefits of certainty against the possibility of chasing a marginally higher price.
Ben says the conversation has evolved considerably from previous market cycles.
“It used to be that people wanted to go to auction because they weren’t comfortable valuing property and they didn’t want to lose out on the upside.
“Whereas now, especially in the market we’re in, it’s not so much about upside as it is getting sold on good terms and all the other things involved in a sale.”
For many apartment, unit and townhouse owners, particularly those below the upper end of the market, the availability of sales data has made pricing less mysterious than it once was.
Buyers and sellers are arriving at negotiations better informed, and that knowledge is influencing decision-making long before a property reaches a portal.
“There’s so much information out there now. It’s pretty easy to get a good sense of value and know a good offer from a bad one. If you can save what is now an extraordinary cost to market and have a property vacant, then a fair offer becomes a very good offer very quickly.”
The database has become the deal engine
Behind this growing preference for pre-market and off-market sales sits something many agencies have spent years building but often underutilising: their database.
While almost every agency promotes the size of its database, he believes the real value lies elsewhere. In a market where buyer numbers are thinner and every genuine prospect matters, the quality of information being collected has become far more important than the volume of contacts sitting inside a CRM.
The difference between a powerful database and an ineffective one often comes down to the discipline of agents during buyer conversations.
Understanding budgets, motivations, property preferences and purchasing timelines requires effort, consistency and ongoing maintenance. Yet that information increasingly underpins everything from pricing recommendations to successful off-market transactions.
“The quality of the data going in is the first one and the second one and the last one really,” Ben says.
“The quality of data going in makes a massive difference because it’s a pain in the neck to do it, and so sales agents often don’t do it properly.
“What demographic is buyer looking at, what type of property they’re looking at, price ranges, budgets … all of those things that should come out of your follow-up calls and buyer meetings need to be going into the database.”
The importance of accurate buyer data becomes even more pronounced when agents begin communicating with prospective purchasers.
Broad, untargetted marketing campaigns may once have generated enough enquiry to justify a scattergun approach, but today’s buyers are far less forgiving of irrelevant content.
“If you give buyers more than two or three points of contact that aren’t relevant to them, they’ll just unsubscribe. It defeats the entire purpose.
“If you give them really targeted information they want to see and listings they actually want to look at, then they’re much more likely to stay on your system.”
Maintaining database quality requires ongoing attention long after the information is initially collected. At Woodards Carnegie, Ben’s team actively monitors buyer engagement, identifies gaps in communication and even treats unsubscribes as potential opportunities rather than dead ends.
“We run reports on people who haven’t been contacted in a certain timeframe; we look for the opposite of the behaviour. We want to see who’s falling out of the net.
“An unsubscribe is actually a list that we call because there’s an opportunity for us to find out what’s happened. They’ve either purchased, something’s changed or potentially become a future seller.”
The growing emphasis on database quality is also reshaping another aspect of agency practice: relationship building.
As technology continues to lower barriers to entry, many of the marketing advantages once enjoyed by larger agencies have become widely accessible. High-quality content creation, social media campaigns and digital advertising can now be executed by almost anyone with the right tools and systems.
That democratisation of marketing is placing renewed importance on skills that technology cannot replicate.
“I think we’re seeing a shift from the best marketer wins model to the best relationship builder wins model,” he says.
“At the top end, a lot of the marketing is pretty similar now. The barrier to entry is pretty low. You don’t need a massive marketing department to get very, very good at marketing quickly because of technology.”
In practice, that means agents are being judged less on the quality of their brochures and more on their ability to build trust in a compressed timeframe.
Buyers may only spend a few minutes with an agent at an open for inspection, but those interactions increasingly determine whether a relationship develops or disappears.
“Negotiation is still a skill. Relationship building and building rapport are still skills.
“It’s building rapport in five minutes at an open for inspection. It’s building rapport in a ten-minute buyer follow-up call.”
Ben encourages his team to focus on creating moments that demonstrate expertise and provide genuine value rather than simply collecting contact details.
“What I talk to the guys about is those moments where people go, ‘I didn’t know that.’
“If you can get that reaction from someone at an open for inspection, you’re doing more than just taking the name and number and then trying to flip them to a different listing.”
Inside the buyer experience overhaul
That philosophy has prompted a broader rethink of the buyer experience at Woodards Carnegie and the office has introduced initiatives designed to provide greater transparency, reduce uncertainty and help buyers navigate an increasingly complex purchasing environment.
“We’re doing a whole overhaul on buyer experience,” he says.
“We have a signature scent that’s sprayed at every single open home … the agent knows all of the outgoings and they have a rental appraisal letter they can access straight away.
“People expect immediacy. That’s what we try and provide.”
Perhaps the most significant change has been the decision to engage buyers more proactively throughout the sales process, particularly ahead of auctions.
Historically, much of the industry’s energy has been directed towards servicing vendors, while buyers were largely expected to educate themselves, he believes that approach no longer reflects the realities of the market.
“We do Zoom calls in the week leading up to the auction if people don’t know how to bid or want to understand the process.
“We’ve traditionally done vendor appointments and sent mass SMS messages to buyers. Now we’re turning to buyer face-to-face appointments, talking through the auction process, answering questions and offering guidance.”
For Ben, these additional touchpoints are ultimately about building confidence; nervous buyers rarely perform well at auction, and uncertainty often translates directly into lower competition.
“The more we can build trust, get face-to-face and get a bit more old school in building relationships, the more likely buyers are to perform on auction day.”
Why pricing has become real-time, not retrospective
The changing market has also altered the nature of vendor conversations, particularly around pricing.
Many agents are discovering that evidence from even a few months ago can be dangerously outdated in rapidly changing conditions.
As a result, pricing discussions are becoming increasingly focused on current buyer behaviour rather than historical sales results.
“You can’t use comparables from three months ago. It’s a waste of time,” he says.
“We’re using comparables from within weeks, not months, and we’re also looking at what’s currently listed and, more importantly, what’s not selling.”
Rather than beginning with historical transactions, Ben says his team often starts with active buyers.
“We think about who is actually going to buy the property because they’ll likely be on our database already.
“We might say we have Jane and Tony who have missed out three times, they’re looking for a three-bedroom townhouse and they have a budget of $1.2 million. We think they would buy your property. Therefore, we think your property is worth $1.2 million.”
It is a methodology grounded in today’s market rather than yesterday’s. More importantly, it often requires agents to have difficult conversations before a campaign begins rather than after it fails.
“What we say around the office is that we’ll have the difficult conversation before we go to market, not during the campaign and not after we’ve failed at auction.
“You’ll see the agents that have overpromised because they’ve gotten away with it for the last few years. There is just stock sitting around everywhere.”
In Ben’s view, honest advice remains one of the most valuable services an agent can provide, even when that advice means recommending that a vendor delay a sale or pursue an alternative strategy.
“If the right advice is to keep it and rent it, then that’s the right advice.”
Perhaps nowhere is this changing dynamic more evident than in the growing popularity of off-market sales. Rising holding costs, styling expenses, advertising budgets and interest rates are forcing vendors to think more carefully about the true cost of chasing an additional premium.
Ben recently walked a vendor through the numbers on a tenanted townhouse, comparing the financial outcome of accepting an off-market offer against undertaking a full campaign.
“When we added up the styling, patch and paint work, marketing costs and the interest cost of having the property vacant during the campaign and settlement period, the difference between selling it off-market and taking it through a traditional campaign was about $55,000.”
The calculation changed the entire conversation.
“They were hoping for a little bit more, but by the time we factored in all those costs they would have needed another $55,000 just to break even.”
For many vendors, that reality is making database-led sales increasingly compelling.
“When you look at how competitive things are now, a fair offer off the database is often better than a strong auction result for a lot of these properties.”
For agents searching for lessons in a softer market, Ben’s observations point to a broader industry shift. Databases are becoming more valuable than advertising budgets, buyer relationships are becoming more important than marketing reach and honest conversations are increasingly replacing optimistic promises.
In an environment where every buyer matters and every listing must be handled carefully, the agents who invest in trust, data quality and meaningful relationships may ultimately be the ones who create the greatest advantage.
“So the more work you do beforehand,” he says, “the more value you create for everyone involved.”