How Top Agents Win When Buyers Pull Back

The market hasn’t “stopped” it’s just stopped carrying lazy habits. We’re three weeks out from AREC, and the timing couldn’t be better because this is exactly when real estate agents find out whether they’re doing the work or just taking orders.

We unpack the practical fundamentals that still sell property in a softer Australian real estate market: doing serious buyer work (more depth, more follow-up, better dialogue), tightening your vendor communication around price, and using real buyer feedback to keep expectations aligned with today’s market value. We also talk about set-to-sell meetings, why hyper-product knowledge matters more than ever, and how to speak with calm confidence when interest rates rise and the buyer-seller gap widens.

Along the way, we share stories about standout performers and what great agents do differently, including generosity, humility, and discipline. The big takeaway is simple: you can’t control the Reserve Bank or the headlines, but you can control your process, your conversations, and the energy you bring to every campaign.

What’s the one skill you’re doubling down on before the year ends?

Transcript

AREC Ticket Rush And Hype

Tom Panos 0:00

Tom Panos, John McGraw, Troy Malcolm, Million Dollar Agent, the podcast. Good to speak to you both. And we have got three weeks till Eric. And I have to say, if you haven't booked your tickets, you better do it right now because Izzy, who um pretty much runs the event, is telling me ahead of previous years. And we all know what it means in real estate. The last three weeks is when everyone's jumping onto the Virgin Jet Star website, trying to get their tickets. I am so pumped. I'm so pumped because even though I think the release of Eric was later this year than other years, the fact that we've got more people coming to the event than we've had any other year is a sign that the program is uh on point. And why wouldn't it be on point? So, Troy, John, do you believe it? It's three weeks to go.

Troy Malcolm 0:56

It's hard, it's hard to believe. It is. Um John and Tom, I jumped in the car and we did Lou filmed the Road to Aric series last week and we interviewed some of our key partners, but also speakers, to give everyone a bit of an insight about them before they see them on stage. Jeez, there's some talented people that are going to be on stage this year. Not only the panelists, but also some of the keynotes. It's very impressive.

Breakout Agents And Quiet Generosity

John McGrath 1:20

Yeah, I look, I'm I'm actually pleasantly surprised. I'll tell you why, not because it's not a great lineup, it's the best we've ever had. But I thought, you know, cost of living, markets down. I thought, uh, it'd be silly if they did, but a lot of agents, if they were going to take a break from ARIC, this might have been the year. But as I think I said to you, Tom, you know, if you if you're having trouble, and I don't I don't want this to sound rude or disrespectful, if you're having trouble affording to get to ARIC, you need to get there, right? Because so many of the good agents that we know of, and and some of them are actually doing better than previous years. They're capitalizing, which we're going to talk about in a minute. They're capitalizing on this market. And and our best people are saying to me, I hope this market doesn't change. I actually think now's the time for good salesmanship, quality conversations, order takers are you use the you use the phrase around. I mean, you know, like you're when when the tide goes out, we'll work out who's been swimming naked. And I think we're starting to see who's swimming naked now with the auction clearance rates. So that's good. And I'll tell you too, I'll give you a tip, and I'm not going to tell you who, but I reckon I might have identified the next Alex Jordan. Uh young lady I spoke today, she works one of our offices. I'm gonna give it away. Um she's been selling for three months. She sold 21 properties in the first three months. I rang her up today, I didn't know her. Embarrassingly, I should have known her. I didn't know her. I rang her up to introduce myself and congratulate her. And it's exactly how I felt when I first sat across the table from Alex Jordan. I thought, my God, this person just nails it. A combination of humility, confidence, um, strategy. Just yeah, it was really, really impressive.

Tom Panos 3:09

So anyway, I will there so I'm gonna there there are three things I'm gonna say about Alex Jordan that people may or may not know of. The first one is that uh in an industry where everyone likes to show off their success, the only bit of success I've ever seen Alex Jordan do is pay the title deeds off his parents' house. And he said to me, the feeling he got to be able to get his old man, who was a taxi driver for many, many years, to be able to stop working by Alex having the ability to earn the money that he makes in real estate to help him have a better life and help his mum and his dad enjoy the second half of their life. Um, he said, that is a feeling I can't get by buying a car, by going on some lifetime holiday. That's the first thing. The second thing is I had coffee with him not a few months ago, and he was talking to me about he's he's had his health issues like me, and we're talking about health. And he turned around and said, Listen, I'm gonna give you a gift. And I said, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, he's been hounding me week in, week out to put this water filtration system. I mean, it's costing, we're talking about thousands and thousands of dollars. He said, Tom, I've already paid for it. I want it in your house. I don't want whether it's in Haberfield or Byron. I want you to make sure that you're not having any water unless it's been totally filtered. And I've seen him done a few things for some gym members in the past that needed some help. He is the BP. He's not the BP. Everyone knows how successful, but this is a person that I think is the poster boy. So if you're telling me, John, we've got the female version of Alex Jordan.

John McGrath 4:48

I got a female version. She's, I reckon, I don't know her age, she's young. Put it that way. Um, and uh at some point we'll get her on this podcast. And and I have no doubt next year she'll be on Aric, even though she's only been selling for three months. Um, what's the name of that false water filter, by the way? Do you know the brand?

Tom Panos 5:04

J John, I don't know, but I can tell you the company's in Perth, and and the guy keeps ringing me up. He says, Listen, Alex has paid for it all. He goes, We just gotta we just we just gotta pull it. We we just gotta we've gotta get it installed.

John McGrath 5:16

Let's let us know next week. They might give me a Troy discount if we uh from.

Troy Malcolm 5:21

Tom, don't you live in Redfern these days? No.

What You Can Control Now

John McGrath 5:23

If you're probably not let's get on with it because we have important tasks to discuss.

Tom Panos 5:29

Yeah, so so there's no question about it. There's various price points in Australia and various regions in Australia that have got less buyer energy than other parts to Australia. However, having said that, one thing is very, very clear. It's nowhere near I've seen real estate in the past with buyer energy. We've spoken about it before. John, if you remember that 1995 period, the 2008 period, there were significantly less buyers. So really, there's four or five things you've got to nail in real estate. They're back to the basics. And I thought in this marketplace, let's just go through the four or five things that you've got control of. You can't control the reserve bank, you can't control competitors, you can't control ALBO, you can't control charmers, but you can control your listing presentation, and you can control how you onboard a client and let them know what's going to happen next. And you can control whether you actually double down on buyer work, which many real estate agents probably have taken a little bit lightly in the last few years. And 100%, you can 100% double down on all this AI that's available to you that can help you become more efficient. But, John Troy, what do you reckon in this market are the three things or four things you've got to nail, not only to survive, because Nick George has said to me, he's been talking to a lot of real estate agents around the country, he said, Tom, I've noticed that they're they're in two camps. Camp number one is, he goes, the Phil Harrises are saying, this is actually pretty good. Our fees are probably gonna go up, we're gonna have less competitors. All of a sudden, vendors understand the importance of skill, which they don't understand when the market is sort of booming. So there's the Phil Harris model where they're saying, bring it on. And there are other agents who are actually saying, hang on a second, I don't know how to handle this because the gap between the buyer and the seller is too much, and I don't know what to do about it. So it's um, yeah, I suppose when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change, and I think some of them are looking at the opportunity.

Buyer Work That Actually Wins

Price Feedback And Daily Updates

Set-To-Sell And Market Knowledge

John McGrath 7:34

This is an easy podcast, Tom. There's three, there's three things, let's get it very simplified. You need to do brilliantly well. Number one is buyer work. You know, we said before, when the tide goes out, we'll see who's been swimming naked. Almost every agent, and I'll and I'll I'll say 90% of the agents in this industry, in my observation experience, have not been doing buyer work anywhere near its capability. They're not working with enough buyers, they're not getting close enough to the buyers, they're not staying frequently in touch with them, they don't have the right dialogue with them, they don't have enough product knowledge on their properties, they're not cross-creatively cross-selling from one suburb or one type of property to another. They have been order taking. Let's get real. So good news is for the really good agents, they'll stop order taking and you will step into this. So, you know, one of my I was talking to an agent this morning, one of our agents in Queensland this afternoon, sorry. And I just said, um You you should have a goal of getting 10 buyers through before the marketing starts. Before domain or REA it hits the property, you should have 10 qualified buyers ready to go through the property getting feedback. So number one is massively increase your the depth, the frequency, the quality of your buyer work. Number two, communication around price. The old days of waiting till the auction, it'll solve it all, vendor will be the auction a bit high, but the buyers will you know they'll outbid each other and they'll get up there. Those days are gone. You need to be after every single inquiry, every conversation, every inspection, you need to be updating the buyer, um, sorry, the seller about buyer feedback. Very, very critical. And someone said to me, Oh, yeah, I have a I have a mid-auction campaign um, you know, catch up with a vendor. I said, No, it's not even a weekly is enough. Daily conversations are critical, more critical than ever. And and if you're thinking I'll wait until the reserve meeting or the mid-campaign meeting or the weekly meeting, you are out of touch. You're delusional. Every time you speak to a buyer and take them through and have a good quality conversation, you need to be updating the the owner on that. A hundred percent of properties that are uh represented in Australia will sell this afternoon if they're priced at market value. So that's that's critical. Um the third one is just having the dialogue to bring all that together. I was talking to one of our agents, Troy, on Friday. You know, I was I was due to do an auction anyway. The good news is we got to weigh 5.4 million. But you know, I was just kind of giving them some dialogue, and and and you know, the reality is I I feel the market. So a few things dialogue. These are not these are must-haves. You know, Tom, here's the reality. We've been through six cycles before. We know it's going to get worse before it gets better. That's just a reality of where we are in the cycle, a reality of we're going to get three more rate rises in all likelihood, a reality that every time our rates go up, buyers have less money to spend. So it's and and and so that's number one. Number two is you know, Tom, the situation we're in is not your fault. And it's not my fault. It's just where the market is. And again, taking the pressure off both you and the vendor, that no one should feel silly here. This is just market movement. And whilst you will you should be doing the job to get the best possible outcome, it doesn't mean the best possible outcome is always going to meet vendor expectations. So I think just having that dialogue and and the and the conversation I had with the vendor on this property, because I was due to do the auction, which we sold before the auction, so it didn't matter. But you know, I just said, look, you know, the property today is probably in the early fives. He was hoping to get high fives. I said, I understand why you are hoping to get that, and we've tried everything we can. Feedback is in early fives. So we got a choice. If you accept the market is efficient, and nowadays the buyers have more access to information on recent sales and ever before, if we accept the efficiency of the market, is that the buyers are in the early fives, and we assume that with two or three more rate rises there'll be another five percent correction, which will take it into high fours. If you take five and a quarter off the table today and you cashed up and you invest that nowadays you can get some pretty damn good investments that are approaching 10% in yield. I mean, there's some first mortgage security stuff that you know you can get 10% yield. So five and a quarter goes to five and three-quarters, whereas reality of the market in 12 months will be 4.7. So your million dollars will be better off if you take the money and invest it because real estate's the world's best investment long term. But there are periods in the in my opinion, there are periods in the cycle where the real estate market is falling and you are better to be a buyer at that point in the cycle or cashed up investor than you are to be hanging on trying to catch the market as it's falling, because that never works. Every time you adjust yourself finally down to the market, it's dropped a bit more. So I think it's just more buyer work, more depth, more frequency. Um, you have to be working with so many buyers the minute you get a listing. And this is the funny thing, people are saying to me, Troy, oh, they're saying to you and Tom too, oh, you know, there's not as many buyers as there were before. Yeah, that's fine. But how many buyers have you met or spoken to in the last month? And if the answer's not a hundred, I'll be shocked. So question is how many of those hundred are you following through? Are you offering properties? Are you uh, you know, are you having daily conversations with? So I think it's pretty simple, Troy. People are panicking unnecessarily. No need to panic. This market is fine. You just need to be priced in today's market.

Troy Malcolm 13:27

Yeah, John, and two other areas that we're noticing around the grounds is um people have constantly overlooked in a more buoyant market the expectations or set-to-sell meeting. Critical in the process to make sure that vendors understand what may happen throughout the course of the next two, three, four weeks. So, right at the front, when you sign the agency agreement, obviously you go back and you perform that set-to-sell expectations, meaning about your communication program, you're open for inspections. What happens if we get an early offer? What happens if we get no offers? How does that strategically place us leading up to the auction? So that area is one. The other one is having really thorough market knowledge. Um, too often, agents are not looking at the competing properties. And when you think about the buyer mindset right now, they're going to shop with logic and then buy with emotion. So if you've got two similar properties that are not priced the same, people are obviously going to lean to the one that seems more valuable in today's market than go necessarily to yours. So we're telling and encouraging all our team to really go deep on the market knowledge and the product knowledge of what's competing in the market and also what's selling. Those two factors are along with the.

Positive Framing For Vendor Decisions

Tom Panos 14:33

It's funny you say that. On Saturday, I had an auction and the vendor turned around and said, I'm not going to take that offer because this other one around the corner is gone for that. And then they pulled it up on their mobile phone onto realestate.com and we're looking at it, and the agent goes, Oh, oh, that one there. And I'm thinking to myself, how can you not know that there's another house around the corner when you're optioning this property that appears to be the closest comparable? There's a classic example of product knowledge, zero out of 10. Like that is basic 101. You've got a vendor's house, you're going to get a 30, 40 grand fee. You've been marketing it for four weeks, and you've got your vendor that said, but what about this house? And you're sitting there stunned. Product knowledge. And as you said, Troy, don't be looking at the comparable sales from three months ago. Look at the comparable sales from three days ago. And that's what hyper product product knowledge is.

John McGrath 15:26

Um now let's remember you wrap around all of this a positive outcome. No one wants to have an agent that's saying, Oh, the market's horrible. Because the market's not horrible. The market's the market. This is the new market. There's a price at which your property, your home, will sell this afternoon, and it's going to be a bit less than the price it would have sold four or six months ago. So again, some people they take it the wrong way. Oh, so I've got to be really negative with my vendor. No, not at all. It's not negative. In fact, I I I heard Burris say something the other day. He said, you know, all that's happened is the market's now taken back the last 12 months of capital growth. You know, we've had three or four years of strong growth, and now the market's given back the last 12 months group growth has been reversed. Yeah. You know, seven to ten percent in many markets. As you say, Queensland seems to be outperforming the rest of the country. And a lot of people I'm talking to in Queensland are saying that their market is still remaining strong. But that that is what it is. So when you say things, Tom, I guess the moral of the story is when you say things like all that's happened, Tom, is the last 12 months of your capital growth has now disappeared, but you've still benefited from four strong years of Sydney capital growth or you know, wherever you're at. Um so I think when you start giving people what they need, you know, it's not your fault, it's not my fault, it's just the market. People want to feel good in making the decision and they don't want to feel embarrassed or silly or panic. And I said to this vendor I was talking to on Friday, I said, look, there's no need to panic. It is what it is, and but I'm just letting you know from having been through six cycles, we've got more to go in this one. If you want to rent it out for three years, we have no problem. It's a great home, it's a great property. We can rent it out for three years. And we're happy to do that. It's your property. Um, but it's not because he he kind of Slaveno said something like, I'll just keep it for another year and sell it. I said, Well, keep it for another three, and we'll be back to where we're at now. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but we're fine to do it. And that was just a matter-of-fact conversation of where I know where the market's at and where it's going to go. But I'm not negative about it. I mean, you keep any property in Australia for the next eight to ten years, you're highly likely to double it. You just won't do very well in Denny markets for the next 12 months.

AREC Lineup And Execution Plan

Tom Panos 17:50

So, John, there's a you talked about being positive, right? There's a positive, there's a positive story. There's a positive story for everyone that's selling and buying in the same market, right? Because the changeover conversation hasn't changed. In fact, there's a a Greek Ethereum, they're the ones with all the money. He just said to me yesterday, he goes, I'm upset because I'm selling my price for a million less. He goes, but I've got to be, I've got to be realistic. The one I'm buying, I thought I would have ended up having to pay two million more. I said, Well, you need to meditate on that. You've made one million dollars transacting in this market. But what you're saying to me is, oh, I would have got an extra million. You would have got an extra million, but you wouldn't have saved two million, right? So I think I think real good real estate agents have to deliver. If it's not positive news, they've got to deliver news in a positive way, right? Um anyway, Troy, John, I'm looking forward to seeing you both in person because the people that we got speaking, apart from the great keynote speakers from America and arguably the best real estate agent at the moment in the world that's coming to Australia in person from the USA, we've also got this young panel of agents that are doing 100 deals a year under 30 years of age. So a lot of people are talking about Kawashi and Alexander uh Phillips and Alex Jordan that we spoke about on the panel. But I've got to tell you, there is something for everyone at Eric. If you're a young guy or girl that thinks that those numbers are telephone numbers when you look at some of these goats, I've got to tell you there are people that have been in real estate for less than three years that are gonna hit close to one and a half billion, and you're gonna hear how they're doing it at the conference. So, Troy, John, I'm looking forward to it. It's one of the few weeks I've come onto the podcast in recent months as a loser at West Tigers, right? That's not the problem. That's just that's just a that's just a small, that's a small bit. By the way, by the way, John, I've got to say, out of everything you've ever done for me, what you did for me last Thursday, Troy, I don't know if you know, John McGrath organized a lunch with none other than Junior one in Pierce at Baritalia, right in the heart of Lycard territory. And let me tell you, first, he's an absolute legend. He asked Con Demurois, he said, have you made sure your pass is gluten-free? I mean, he's one of the guys that, and I actually, and John, I actually ended up watching a bit of footy with him over the uh on YouTube afterwards, and I've worked out this guy here was ahead of his time with fitness, energy, and nutrition. He wasn't a natural with offloading. When I was watching him, he'd take the ball up. He was he's not one of these flamboyant players, but this guy was so disciplined with his health and his fitness, and he's still disciplined today at 66 years of age.

John McGrath 20:41

He looks like he could run on at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, Troy. He looks incredible, but uh and a good fella. And and uh we've actually spoken, Troy, without you. We we held a committee meeting and we thought he could actually be a great because he's now into leadership um and uh personality profiling a lot, and we thought he'd be a brilliant addition to our podcast. So we're gonna tee that up. Um, but a legend. No, my pleasure, Tommy. I'm glad we had that sit down, and we will see everyone at ARIC. But get your ticket soon, because I reckon it'll be sold out about 10 days before. And I hate people to ring me or text me saying, Can we get a ticket when there aren't none?

Tom Panos 21:17

And real estate gym members, if you're listening to this now, this is your signal today to go on to the ARIC site to get your ticket, and this is your signal to book your airfares and book your accommodation and be smart about it. Get there Saturday after your work day, maybe stay there Monday night, Tuesday, pull out a blank book, write out your execution plan, and then come back and execute and finish the year strong. Troy, John, it's my pleasure. We'll see you next time.

John McGrath 21:47

See everyone.