You wouldn’t go broke writing a hit piece on Australian real estate agents. It’s clickbait that works every day of the week, and it works best in a market like this one, when somebody has to be blamed for the number at the bottom of the contract.
Which is why the last five months have surprised me.
I talk to agents most weeks. Not formally, just conversations. I expected to hear doom, and what I get instead is closer to stoicism.
This too shall pass, said without much drama, by people who are plainly not enjoying themselves.
It isn’t easy and nobody pretends otherwise, but there’s remarkably little self pity in it.
When I wrote about Diego Traglia and Tom Panos back in March, I was seven weeks into a job at a real estate data company and openly puzzled by what I was hearing.
Every agent told me prospecting had got harder, and meanwhile Diego was selling a property every 48 hours.
Seven months in, I’ve stopped being puzzled by that one and started paying attention to something else.
Ask an agent what the hardest part of this market actually is and very few of them start with the numbers.
They start with the phone call. The one where you go back to a vendor you appraised at 1.1 and tell them it’s closer to 950.
The one where a buyer who would have paid the asking price eighteen months ago is enjoying the fact that they no longer have to.
The one with an associate who’s been knocked back all week and has started taking it personally.
Tom Panos has been in real estate for 40 years. When he spent a session with our customers on the Friday before spring, he didn’t open with a market read. He opened with that.
“You’re not the bad news when you’re talking to your vendor. You’re the messenger of the bad news, but you’re not the bad news itself.”
It sounds like a small distinction and it isn’t. A lot of agents are carrying their vendors’ disappointment as though they caused it, and no amount of extra activity fixes that.
Some perspective from someone who has seen worse
Tom doesn’t talk this market down or dress it up, and he has enough history to rank it honestly.
Harder, he says, than the 2017 to 2019 downturn that came with the Royal Commission. Easier than the GFC.
Much easier than the early nineties, when rates hit 18 per cent and, in his words, there simply were no buyers. “Who’s going to borrow money at 18 per cent?”
His concern isn’t the market. It’s who is in it. More than half the industry, he estimates, has only ever worked a good one, a large cohort who came in from 2020 and learned the job in conditions that no longer exist.
They were trained to negotiate with three buyers, not one.
When a buyer now says 650 is the last offer and means it, they don’t know what to say, and when they have to go back to an owner who wanted 900 and explain that it’s 750, they put the conversation off until it’s too late to have it well.
That’s a skills gap, and skills gaps close. The part that doesn’t negotiate is the arithmetic.
The number most agents haven’t run
Take a market that did 1,000 sales. Volume falls 30 per cent, so the market is now 700 sales.
If you held 10 per cent market share, you were doing 100 of them.
To do those same 100 sales in a 700 sale market, you now need 14.3 per cent market share.
That isn’t a four point move.
Going from 10 per cent to 14.3 per cent is a 43 per cent increase in market share, and it earns you exactly what you earned last year.
“When the pie gets smaller, you need a bigger slice. If transaction volumes are down, standing still means going backwards.”
Tom was uncomfortable delivering that as a goal and said so, because nobody joins a webinar to be told a good year looks like last year’s income.
But the upside sits on the other side of the same sum.
When volume returns to 1,000 sales and you’re holding 14.3 per cent, you’re writing 143 sales.
You didn’t just get through the season, you moved up the ladder in your patch while your competitors were deciding whether to stay in the industry at all.
There are three levers, he says, and only three: accept a lower income, lift your average fee, or take market share from someone else.
He’s unsentimental about the last one. “It’s possible. It’s not easy. If it was that easy, why didn’t you do it last year?”
Acceptance, and the conversation it makes possible
Before any of that comes acceptance, and he means the agent’s, not the vendor’s.
“The agent that accepts the market before their competitors is going to win.”
His observation is that vendor education has largely been outsourced.
The media, he says, now does better vendor management than agents do.
Owners are reading price falls on their phones every morning and arriving at the appraisal already softened up, while some agents are still defending the old number, standing over the price like a German Shepherd, and losing credibility while they do it.
Which is the strange thing about all that media coverage.
The same headlines that make agents the villain are the reason vendors now turn up to the appraisal already halfway to the number.
It beats them up and does their job for them at the same time.
What he offers instead is perspective, which isn’t the same thing as optimism.
He described being stopped in a Sydney cafe by a man who asked how far prices had fallen locally.
Tom told him around 20 per cent at that price point and the man was shocked.
Then Tom pointed out that the same market had risen roughly 70 per cent in five years, and the reaction changed. “It went up 70 per cent in five years. It was unsustainable.”
That’s a conversation an agent can actually have. Down 10, still 50 ahead. It isn’t spin, it’s context, and it’s the difference between an owner who feels robbed and an owner who will meet the market.
Why prospecting matters more now, not less
This is the point most likely to be misread, because the instinct in a slow market is to pull back.
In a hot market, if you listed it, it sold.
Tom puts the current list to sell ratio in some areas at around 50 per cent, based on his own training work with agencies, and if half your listings sell then 30 sales doesn’t require 30 listings. It requires 60.
“Stock is oxygen. You need more listings, because amongst all the listings there’s the motivated ones and there’s the unmotivated ones. The only way you’ll ever find out is by listing them, because many vendors hide their need to sell at the time of listing.”
More listings means more appraisals, which means more connects, and that’s where the real problem sits.
Enquiry has dried up.
In a good market, buyer enquiry hands an agent a natural reason to pick up the phone, and right now, as Tom put it, you’ve got to create the communication, because often you’ve got no one.
The reason to call has to be manufactured, and making one that’s accurate and relevant is a data problem.
Which is worth noting, because the objection Tom hears most when he tells agents to prospect isn’t that they don’t want to.
It’s that they don’t know who to call.
The honest bit about data, again
I flagged this last time and it still applies. iD4me is a real estate data platform, we hosted the webinar, and you should read the next few paragraphs with that in mind.
Diego said in the March piece that he wished he’d had these phone numbers ten years ago, that he could do ten calls in the time ten door knocks used to take.
Tom’s version of the same story is older and starker.
Selling through the early nineties recession, getting owner names meant going to the council, paying, and being handed five records.
Not five suburbs. Five records.
“That’s why door knocking was the only thing you could really do back then.”
Who to call is largely solved.
Whether you’ll call is still entirely on you.
I wrote that in March and five months of a harder market haven’t changed it.
Tom put his own view without prompting, and we’ll let it stand as he said it: “If you’re not paying for an iD4me subscription, you’re not in the game in prospecting.”
The thing that has actually changed
One thing is genuinely different from the last downturn, and it isn’t the market.
It’s the regulatory floor.
AML obligations have landed on real estate, and contact and privacy rules are being enforced more actively than they were.
When markets tighten corners get cut, and the corner most easily cut in prospecting is whether the number being called was ever consented for that purpose.
Publicly available and lawfully usable aren’t the same thing.
For a principal, that’s the question worth asking this spring.
Not whether the team is making enough connects, but whether you could show, for any number they called, where it came from and that you were entitled to use it.
At iD4me every record carries its Do Not Call Register status in the platform, and behind that we hold the consent trail, so if the question is ever asked in earnest there is an answer.
That isn’t a growth feature, it’s what lets an agent prospect hard without creating a problem for the office.
Outlast the season
Tom finished on the simplest instruction of the day.
Control the controllables: conversations, appraisals, listings, buyer appointments, offers, price adjustments, and your own energy.
Everything else is weather.
The agents who came out of the GFC in front weren’t the ones who waited for confidence to return.
They kept picking up the phone while their competitors went quiet, and arrived at the recovery holding a bigger share of a market that grew back around them.
The March piece ended by saying the phone is still ringing, and the only question is whether you’re the one picking it up.
There were buyers in the market then.
This one asks something harder, because you have to make the call when nothing is giving you a reason to, to an owner who may not want to hear it, about a number that has moved.
On the days that feels like too much, it’s worth going back to where Tom started.
You’re not the bad news.
You’re the person telling the truth about it, and that’s a harder job and a more valuable one.
The full recording of Tom Panos’s session, along with his presentation and the vendor and buyer scripts he shared, is available here.