Real estate agent fees not as easy to attain as many people think


What just happened? One minute we were all Christmas carols in the office and looking forward to
a few days off and now we are approaching the end of the first quarter!

One of my favourite sayings is to “work like you are going on holiday”. It is always amazing how much you can accomplish if you have a deadline or, forbid me for even saying it in this business, a holiday.


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Without sounding like an overworked real estate agent (who I acknowledge few would have any
sympathy for), it can be quite difficult to take time off.

There is never a point where we don’t have properties for sale and I certainly can’t just disappear and leave everything on hold for weeks at a time.

What ends up happening is a holiday becomes a change of scenery and routine, with a few
hours of work every couple of days... and a phone never too far from my side (thankfully Telstra now
have unlimited text and calls back to Australia for $10 a day!).

Rather than curse the “always on” expectation that seems to be the norm these days, you have to embrace it and enjoy the fact that we can work from basically anywhere in the world. 

FEES

People often remark about real estate agent’s fees and how high they can appear. I get that on paper it can seem like we are disproportionately rewarded for an easy task.

In my many conversations with people selling, I often reference that about 1 in 20 sales are easy and bordering on being a bit of a fluke. In those instances, I acknowledge we get paid well and, conversely, the
seller is usually happy for the quick sale. A win/win situation.

On the other hand however, there are plenty of situations where we work countless hours only to have the property removed from the market or the seller decide that another agent is going to magically make the house sell.

I would estimate that at the upper end of the Cairns property market (say, above $1.5m) it would not be unusual for property to take more than 6 months to sell and, in many cases, it can literally take years for some properties to find the right buyer. I say the “right buyer” because it is often not a matter of price, location or marketing – we just sometimes need to find the right person for the property.

I have made a habit of having some of Cairns' best properties on the books for the last 15 years or so and the challenge of getting them sold is always something I’ve enjoyed.

Providing the best service to my clients (the seller) has seen me grow “my team” to three, with Renae and Ashlie making sure that we genuinely provide first class service.

On my own there is no way I could keep up with the amount of work we do in the background.