When market conditions shift into what REMAX Northern Realty Principal Wes McGregor calls “price discovery mode,” the gap between average order takers and true real estate professionals widens overnight.
In a landscape where sellers hold onto yesterday’s peak figures and buyers respond to headline news, transactions grind into a standoff that typically takes six months to settle.
For Wes, who marks 25 years with the REMAX brand, this normalisation isn’t something to fear, it’s something to cheer.
“I actually prefer a normal market to the crazy market we’ve had,” Wes says.
“When listing a property was as simple as telling owners what they wanted to hear, agents accumulated 30 listings they couldn’t service. You can’t do 30 open houses on a Saturday, and you can’t sell listings to pay rent. A tougher market brings the really good agents to the fore.”
Having spent nearly three decades in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, particularly Albany Creek, Wes isn’t just surviving market shifts, he is actively engineering how agents will navigate them using cutting edge artificial intelligence and hyper local positioning.
From “ideas man” to tech pioneer
Wes describes himself as a classic “ideas man” who found his stride when he paired creativity with discipline.
“I’ve always had a million ideas, and that’s haunted me for most of my life, 200 domain names that you own because every time you have a new idea, you better secure it,” Wes says.
“We’re very good at starting things, not very good at completing things. But ADHD becomes a superpower when it’s paired with discipline. You can be creative and think outside the box, but when you’re actually disciplined, that’s when it becomes a superpower.”
Long before artificial intelligence hit the mainstream, Wes was aiming ahead of the curve. “If you go clay pigeon shooting, you’ve got to aim ahead of where the clay pigeon is. I’ve always tried to do that with real estate, that whole thing of innovators and imitators.”
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in early 2023, Wes went straight down the rabbit hole like a “kid in a candy store.”
“To me, it felt like having a second shot at the late nineties .com bubble that I completely missed,” Wes says. “We went from ChatGPT being Google on steroids to exploring entirely new use cases.”
Partnering with a tech focused co founder, Wes launched Vaire (vaire.ai), an AI platform designed specifically for real estate agents. Vaire turns standard listing photos into ready to post, cinematic video content in under five minutes, cutting the cost of traditional video production.
Overcoming Cognitive Dissonance: PAs, VAs, and AIDAs
Wes notes that the biggest hurdle to AI adoption in real estate isn’t capability; it’s mindset and a psychological barrier known as cognitive dissonance.
“Cognitive dissonance is basically the dilemma people have when presented with something that is good and bad at the same time,” Wes says.
“As human beings, it’s much easier to just fear something than it is to be curious about it. If 100 people are presented with the same situation, a big percentage will instantly go into fear mode. Only a few will be curious.
“When a 60 year old hears the word ‘AI’, that’s very different to when a 23 year old hears it.”
Yet, Wes argues that agents who bury their heads in the sand risk swift irrelevance and the industry has progressed from agents hiring Personal Assistants (PAs) to leveraging Virtual Assistants (VAs). Now, we are entering the era of AIDAs, AI Digital Assistants.
“We’re moving into a place where it will be real estate agents with AIVAs, it’s not just going to be VAs that can respond to an email. It’s going to be building and running whole ecosystems,” he says.
“AI creates efficiency, but it will also begin to expose inefficiency. Over the next 12 months, there’s going to be a huge chasm between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, the people who embrace it and the people with their fingers in their ears going la la la la la.”
What AI Can’t Replace: The 5% That Matters
If AI can automate 90% to 95% of administrative, descriptive, and back end tasks, what remains for the human agent?
During a high achievers retreat in Queenstown, Wes posed a radical challenge to fellow REMAX directors: ‘Let’s sit down in a room for a day and knock out a way of how we can completely replace the real estate agent with AI’.
“Because if we can come up with a plan to replace us, guess what? We’re in trouble,” Wes says. “In the same way that a gold mine gets a whole bunch of dirt and refines it down to little bars of gold, what is our gold as a real estate agent? We need to very quickly identify what that is and double down on it.”
After stress testing the idea, Wes concluded that while up to 95% of traditional agent workflow can be automated or streamlined, two critical elements form an unassailable competitive moat:
1. Unfiltered hyper local intelligence:
Property portals and algorithms can calculate price per square metre, zoning, or median yield, but they cannot replicate true micro pocket knowledge.
“I’ve been working in Albany Creek for 27 years. I know the area backwards. I know the streets that are the good streets and the streets where you shouldn’t buy,” Wes says. “You won’t find that on realestate.com or Domain. That hyper local information is our gold. Portals want to gatekeep data and monetise it, but water will find the path of least resistance, and human attention follows ease.”
2. Emotional management and negotiation:
At its core, an agent’s ultimate value lies in protecting clients from their own emotional missteps.
“Boiled down, our job as an agent is to save sellers from themselves,” he says. “I spent an hour and a half on the phone on holidays protecting a seller from making dumb, emotionally based decisions. My wife listened to it and said, ‘If you didn’t have to do that, seller and buyer could just agree.’ But the reality is they can’t. That’s why sellers don’t sell properties themselves, their emotions get in the way. You can’t build an algorithm around that.”
Finally, while much of the industry is focused on today’s AI tools, Wes is already picturing the next frontier and for him, the future of property inspections won’t necessarily involve buyers walking through the front door themselves.
“I was standing at an open house imagining a Tesla pulling up and one of Elon’s robots getting out to be the eyeballs for a buyer sitting in their lounge with 3D glasses,” Wes says.
“It sounds crazy, but everything makes sense in hindsight. When the internet started, nobody knew what we’d use it for and now it’s obvious.
“Hindsight is a beautiful thing, but it’s of no significant value whatsoever. You have to be leading the surge.”