Conrad

Desperate agents vent online as real estate downsize bites. Oh my Lord, give someone a microphone, eh? I don't know. I— so we've got a case of There's a change in the market. It's going in the direction that a lot of people, it doesn't agree with. Agents, namely. And anything put out there is fair game. Fair play. I just love the bit how it's a case of taking the negative What was that one? What was that one? The one where the guy put, Jessica Thompson, you stole from us during a final— during the open for inspection. Someone took a creative view of why it's so negative of the risk. These things are always a risk, isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't that why we like the, the idea of creativity? Because if you're thinking outside the box, I don't know if I would have used stealing, but hey, it got the clicks, he got the exposure. I'm sure his vendor got a lot of unpaid marketing. Whether it attracted the right person is another matter, but social media, it's a megaphone, and people get singled out for how they use it. Fascinating. But interestingly, all this talk of the downturn and people running out of the industry made me wonder. I started when it was a real recession in '92. So that was the recession we all had, that we had, Australia had to have. Thank you, Paul Keating. But it goes to show how much the industry's grown. I know it's been a while, But in New South Wales, there's roughly 14,000 licensed real estate agents. It's more like 42,000 now. So just sheerly through the number of people working as licensed agents, you're going to have attrition. You have attrition even in an up market. Oh, I can't take the stress. Now it's stress of a different kind. I can't take the pressure going up. I can't take the stress coming down. It's really fascinating. 20% dropped out of the market as licensed agents in the '90s. Interestingly, when we had the GFC slash COVID, there was 35,000 licensed agents in New South Wales. Not an exact number, but they're in and about And if anything, after that, things went up in the industry. More people joined off the back of the COVID boom. But $42,000 is a fair chunk. That's a lot of licensing fees. So will people leave? Yeah, they always do. Do things take longer? Yes, they do. Can the market be rushed? No, markets do what markets do. We're talking macroeconomics, yet everyone's carrying on as though they're the master of their universe. But all these things here are fascinating because at this moment in time, there's two ways of looking at it. You've got your cookie cutter mentality, and that's turnover, turnover, get those numbers, KPIs, blah blah blah blah. Great. But then you have others that are more bespoke, others that are very niche, very specialized, referral-based, got a good Rolodex of contacts. So this is where adaption happens. If you're a cookie-cutter agent that thinks of high volume, The world's gonna look really, really, really weird, and it's gonna look weird because you don't have 10, 20, 30, 40 people. You might have one. Yeah, depends on your philosophy. We all like things to happen for us and things to be easy, but is it that much harder when rather than not having the opportunity to speak to people who you'd like to speak to, Because you can do callbacks, yes. But when you're in the room in front of someone reading their body language, looking in the same direction at something you may jointly be talking about, you— it's— this is really a great opportunity for agents to spend time with buyers. All things being well, if you're a good practitioner. You'd like to have a conversation, even if it's a 10-minute conversation, but at least you're not having a distraction of 20 people walking past you or people being paranoid about being overheard. I was at an appointment earlier today. I sat down for 10 or 15 minutes. I think I left there 30 or 40 minutes later, but I got a really good understanding as to the buyer and how they saw the world and where they were thinking and It gave a good insight and that might lead somewhere. I'd hate to think if the room was full of people, I don't think that would have happened. So perhaps it's the age of the artisan agent where you have someone in front of you, you spend time and you get to know them and maybe we'll all be better off for it. I know definitely it does pace things a lot differently. It makes your callback look, at least look very different. Also, in that Sydney Morning Herald article today, they, I loved how they cited that, that gentleman, that agent, he might've been Interstate. Talking about vendors shouldn't sell their own property, and by you taking out commission, if you just discount the commission and use that as your baseline, the buyer wins, you're not winning. I really don't know how you're going to win. I really don't know how you win people over when they can say, I'll do what the hell I want with my asset. And look, overall, some people can sell their own properties and probably Maybe do it better than some people they pay. That's always the case with anything, right? But I think he would have been far better served by perhaps quoting people that are a little bit more articulate and insightful. What was the saying? A man who represents himself has a fool as a client. If you've sold your own property or you represented yourself, you know. Someone makes an objection, you get offended. It's easy to get touchy. It's yours. It's your house. It's your money. So it takes a real kind of person. You've got to be really conditioned to sort of let it be water off a duck's back, I think. I think it's just an easier thing to say that you're paying someone for their objectivity. If you went to represent yourself legally, you pay someone for their objectivity. You're not trying to disprove yourself. It's about fact. There is an approach. There is a nuance to understanding how to communicate. Sales is communication, and albeit even leasing is a form of sales. But I tell you, some— this is some interesting times. People's behavior— you only know someone's real Personality in the face of adversity. I don't think we're at adversity yet, but I'm guessing some people think they are and they're getting on their little microphones. So it's interesting, really interesting.