Simon Clarke says a recent deal he and his Setlr team completed vividly illustrated the value a buyer’s agent can deliver to a struggling client.
Simon has a theory about buyers’ agents that he’s refined over years of working in his specific market. There are, he’ll tell you, three types.
First, the borderless operators working from their lounge rooms, buying anywhere from Broome to Bondi. Second, the generalists who will buy as far as their car will carry them from their home base. And third, the specialists who are surgically focused on a tightly defined patch of turf, knowing every street, every agent, every deal that moves through it.
Simon and his team fall firmly into the third category. Their territory is Brisbane, and within that space, they transact hundreds of deals each year.
That value of specialisation became very real for a client, Chris, who walked into the Setlr office not long ago.
Chris had been searching for three months. Divorced, two teenage kids, newly requalified from engineer to teacher, he needed a minimum three-bedroom, two-bathroom home – a house or townhouse in the Morningside and Hawthorne corridor, stretching to Carina and Cannon Hill if needed. Budget: $1.9 million. Results so far: practically nothing.
He sat down with Simon and explained his frustration. There were around twenty selling agents active in his target areas. Of those twenty, roughly one had shown any genuine interest in helping him. The rest? Unreturned calls, dismissive walk-throughs at opens, and a whiff of an off-market opportunity that went nowhere when the vendor changed their mind.
“Those 19 agents couldn’t care less,” Chris said.
Simon didn’t sugarcoat the explanation. Those agents are paid by sellers, he told Chris. To them, a buyer without a proven track record is an unknown quantity. They’re someone who might waste their time, fall over at finance, or simply disappear. They don’t need the hassle.
But a buyers’ agent they’ve transacted with dozens of times? That’s a different conversation entirely.
Simon put it plainly, “We’ve bought with every single one of those twenty agents you’ve been dealing with. They know us. They trust that our clients are qualified and that we won’t waste their time.”
Within a week of coming on board, Simon’s team was showing Chris half a dozen off-market properties that the broader market had never seen. Three weeks after engagement, they secured him a four-bedroom, three-bathroom townhouse in Hawthorne – off market, not on any listing portal. Best of all, the end price of $1.795 million was well under budget.
The postscript was telling. A friend of Simon’s who lives in the same complex later mentioned she’d had no idea the property had ever been for sale. And when another agent found out Simon had secured the deal, they assumed it had cost somewhere north of $1.9 million. It hadn’t. Not even close.
For Simon, the story crystallised something he already knew but rarely gets to illustrate so cleanly. “Everyday buyers think they’re talking to the market because they’re going to open homes. But agents aren’t going to show them the real opportunities, they don’t know them yet.”
The value of a specialist buyers’ agent isn’t just negotiation muscle. It’s the quiet, accumulated weight of relationships built over hundreds of transactions, and what those relationships unlock for the clients smart enough to use them.
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