Hiring a Buyer’s Agent First Could Cost Investors Years

Thinking of hiring a buyer’s agent to see you through these difficult times?

Think again…

For most of the past five years, property investing in Australia has been very forgiving.

You could have picked almost any suburb at random – Melbourne aside – and still come out ahead.

In that kind of market, the order in which you did things barely mattered. Whether the strategy or the agent came first, the outcome was similar.

That environment is gone as we transition into a very difficult market.

Prices have cooled, and many markets have reached their peak. What happens next depends far more on judgement than luck.

That is exactly why one very common habit among investors – hiring a buyer’s agent before they have nailed down their strategy – has quietly become one of the more expensive mistakes you can make right now.

Let me be clear… this is not an argument against buyers’ agents. They are valuable, deliver real outcomes, and for homebuyers, they are often worth far more than their fees.

The issue is about sequencing: who gives the orders and who simply takes them.

Hiring a Buyer's Agent FIRST Is the Mistake Costing Investors Years

Order Takers, Not Strategists

A buyer’s agent is only as good as the brief they’re handed.

Ask for a $1 million property in Darwin, and that is what you will get, whether or not it suits your situation.

If the buyer’s agent is the one setting the direction rather than executing a well-considered strategy, the investor has effectively handed the steering wheel to someone whose job is to transact, not to plan.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, so before engaging one, it is worth asking three questions that most investors never think to ask.

Question One: Will They Talk Against Their Own Interest?

Buyer’s agencies are generally transactional rather than relationship-based businesses.

Their income depends on the deal going through, which creates an inherent incentive to recommend that you buy, or sell and buy again, whether or not it is genuinely in your best interests.

I remember a client who came to see me a number of years ago, seeking help selling a property to fund the purchase of another. 

The easy path would have been to agree, sell the existing asset, and use the proceeds to buy a development site.

It would have generated a transaction and a fee, but after running the numbers, it was clear the client’s existing property was worth holding rather than selling.

Recommending that they keep it rather than sell meant working against the more profitable short-term outcome and our own short-term interests.

Very few buyer’s agents will do that because their business model doesn’t reward it.

So ask directly: are they willing to tell you that you should not buy?

Picture a Victorian-based buyer’s agent sitting across from a client who has already purchased their home, a townhouse and a house, all in Melbourne, in the same pocket, and worth a combined $2.65 million.

They are overconcentrated in one market, one asset class and one set of economic drivers.

What would a Victoria-only buyer’s agent recommend? Almost always, it would be to buy another property in Victoria, because that is the only way they get paid.

The lesson is not that any one city is bad. Rather, it is that an adviser who knows only one market will offer only one answer.

Question Two: Do They Give You the Devil in the Detail?

Budget headlines rarely tell the full story, and right now the details matter more than they have for years.

At Metropole, we had a client with an $850,000 budget who was shopping for a property two to three weeks before the federal budget announcement.

They were relying on negative gearing to make the numbers work, but once the budget landed, negative gearing on established properties remained available for another 12 months, ending on 1 July 2027.

That single policy shift changed everything about what ‘affordable’ actually meant for their purchase.

Rather than pushing ahead with purchasing a property, we started again and pulled the numbers apart from scratch, including buffers, holding costs and the outcome once negative gearing ended.

Following the original plan would have left them with roughly $39,000 in holding costs per year once the tax benefit ended. That amount would have exhausted their savings buffer by around year three, likely forcing a sale.

Instead, our strategy shifted to a newer property in a small boutique complex that qualified for negative gearing and offered meaningful depreciation.

Their holding costs came down by more than half, and the buffer comfortably covers five to seven years.

That is the kind of adjustment a transactional buyer’s agent, focused on finding a property rather than the right structure, is unlikely to consider.

Some might flag that holding costs will rise, but far fewer will model the buffer, the runway, and the finance strategy in enough detail to give genuine confidence and a level of safety in the decision.

Question Three: Do They Actually Know the Ground?

The last test is the simplest and the easiest to overlook: has this person actually lived and worked in the market where they are buying?

We often see property managers conducting inspections on behalf of interstate buyers’ agents, and agents flying in from Perth to assess opportunities in Brisbane without a real feel for the street-by-street nuances that drive value.

That approach might have worked in a market where almost everything went up in value regardless, but it is a much greater risk in a market where strict selection matters again.

Think about the suburb you live in.  

You know the best streets and the ones to avoid, the school catchments, where the social housing is, which roads are quiet and which are busy cut-throughs.

You can’t get that knowledge from a spreadsheet, and it doesn’t come from someone who’s flown in for the day.

Good buyer’s agents specialise and genuinely know 10 to 15 suburbs inside out, rather than claiming expertise across all of Australia’s roughly 15,000 suburbs.

They know which properties are for sale that never made it to a listing site.

They can unlock off-market opportunities an investor would never find alone.

And, importantly, if you can’t inspect a property yourself, they know what you are actually looking for rather than simply ticking boxes on a form.

The Takeaways

Here are four principles worth holding onto before engaging anyone to buy on your behalf:

• Know your real borrowing capacity – both versions of it, with negative gearing and without it. The gap between the two numbers will now matter much more for many investors.
• Understand your runway. Know whether your buffer will last two or six years, and make sure the property you buy fits the runway you actually have rather than the one you assumed you had.
• Insist on local expertise. Look for a decade or more of living and working in the specific market, rather than a national brand offering a fly-in service.
• Never hand over the orders. A buyer’s agent should execute a strategy rather than set it.

The market ahead will handsomely reward investors who get the sequence right: strategy first, execution second.

Hire the buyer’s agent to do what they do best, but only once you, or someone genuinely qualified, have already worked out what ‘best’ looks like for your situation.