Stock remains tight, competition is rising, and many buyers are finding themselves outpaced by campaigns that move faster and more aggressively than they can respond to.
Sellers have long benefited from professional representation; buyers, by comparison, often operate with limited insight into how campaigns are structured and how decisions are made behind the scenes.
A growing segment of the industry argues that imbalance cannot continue.
Among them is Albert Sassoon, founder of Pacific Property Buyers and a former sales principal with twenty-five years of eastern suburbs experience.
Albert believes that buyer advocacy is entering a new phase, one that will increasingly favour practitioners with genuine sales backgrounds.
“When I started in real estate, it was all about relationship, trust and referral,” Albert says.
“Over the last twenty years, it’s become less about relationships and more about selling yourself, fees and price the agent thinks the home is worth. More often than not, that’s inflated to win the business.”
That shift, he says, contributed to his decision to step away from listings altogether.
“I loved working with people that valued my experience and knowledge. The journey of buying a first home or a dream home, building relationships and becoming that trusted property adviser is what excites me.”
What Albert noticed once he moved to the buyer side was a problem most consumers don’t see clearly – they are entering a sophisticated process without the experience to interpret it.
“Most buyers don’t understand when guides are too low. Or when an agent is just telling them a story or when a property on the market has no urgency at all,” he explains.
“With twenty-five years of reading these situations, I know what’s real and what’s not.”
Albert says this reality often determines whether a buyer secures or misses out on the property they want.
“Buyers think you just send an email with an offer,” he says.
“If I was the selling agent, I’d want a signed contract and a 66W. That tells me they’re ready to buy.”
Without that knowledge, a buyer may appear unserious, even when they aren’t.
“It’s about reading the play,” he says. “What are the agents saying? How are they saying it? Is there urgency? Is there desperation? You need to understand that before you decide what to do.”
Albert’s first year running Pacific Property Buyers illustrates how much of the market now sits outside public campaigns.
In the first 12 months on the buyers’ agency side, his company has secured over $100,000,000 of residential property for his clients.
“Forty per cent of what I bought this year was off market,” he says.
“And about thirty per cent was pre-auction. You don’t get those opportunities unless agents trust that you’re bringing real buyers.”
Ironically, the shift to the buyer side has improved his relationships with selling agents – people he once competed against.
“When I was selling, other agents saw me as competition,” he says. “Now, we’re part of the same transaction. While representing the buyer’s best interest, we’re working together to get a deal done.”
This collaborative model, he argues, is becoming increasingly important as buyers hit the limits of what they can achieve alone.
“Young families go out for six or eight weeks, looking, bidding, getting out-priced and getting frustrated,” Albert says.
“At that point, people start questioning themselves, ‘Is it the budget, the location, or is there just nothing to look at?’ They don’t know. They just know they keep missing out.”
His early work with new clients often involves addressing those misunderstandings: “If you’re looking in Bondi, you need three-and-a-half to four million,” he says.
“If you go to Maroubra or Coogee, you might need two and a half or three million. So you either adjust your budget or adjust your suburb.”
This realignment is essential because buyers now face a level of competition that is both emotional and structural.
“People think a buyer’s agent is about getting a bargain,” Albert says.
“It’s not about buying cheap. It’s about buying opportunity before it opens up to the market and emotional bidding.”
Across all price points, whether a young family moving into a semi or a buyer acquiring at $15 million, he says, the pressure points are the same.
“They have the money. They just don’t have the time, the patience or the ability to understand how the process works”
His view of the sector’s future is direct: “I think in three to five years, most people will use a buyer’s agent,” he says.
“Eighty per cent of buyers don’t have the skillset to deal with low stock and high competition. They’ll need a professional to help them secure a property.”
What’s emerging is less a shift in branding and more a shift in structure.
Buyer’s agents are moving into the role of strategic advisers rather than property finders: interpreting campaign dynamics, guiding negotiation pathways, and correcting buyer assumptions before they cost real money.
