Hiring a Buyer’s Agent FIRST will Cost Investors Years | Market Room

Thinking of hiring a Buyers Agent to see you through these difficult times?

Think again….

For most of the last five years, property investing in Australia has been forgiving.  You could have picked a suburb almost at random — Melbourne aside — and still come out ahead.

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

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

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

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

This isn't an argument against buyer's agents, they're valuable, they create real outcomes, and for home buyers they’re often worth every dollar.

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

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's what you'll get — whether or not it's the right move for 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's worth asking three questions that most investors never think to ask.

Question One: Will They Talk Against Their Own Interest?

Buyer's agents are generally a transactional business, not a relationship business.

Their income depends on the deal happening — which means there's an inherent pull toward recommending you buy, or sell and buy again, whether or not it's genuinely in your best interest.

Consider a client who came in years ago wanting help selling a property so they could 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, not selling.

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

[tip] Very few buyer's agents will do that, because their business model doesn't reward it. [/tips]

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

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

Overconcentrated in one market, one asset class, one set of economic drivers.

What does a Victoria-only buyer's agent recommend? Almost always: buy more in Victoria as it's the only way they get paid.

The lesson isn't that any one city is bad. It's that an adviser who only knows one market will only ever offer 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 in years.

Take a client with an $850,000 budget, shopping for a property two to three weeks before a federal budget announcement.

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He was relying on negative gearing to make the numbers work.

Once the budget landed, negative gearing on established properties remained available for another 12 months — but was set to end on 1 July 2027.

That single policy shift changed everything about what "affordable" actually meant for his purchase.

Rather than push ahead with the property, we started again and the numbers were pulled apart from scratch: buffers, holding costs, and the outcome once negative gearing disappeared.

The original plan would have landed him with roughly $39,000 a year in holding costs once the tax benefit was gone — a figure that would have blown through his savings buffer by around year three, likely forcing a sale.

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

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

That's 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 they're buying in?

We often see property managers conducting inspections on behalf of interstate buyers' agents and agents flying in from Perth to assess opportunities in Brisbane, with no feel for the street-by-street nuance that drives value.

It might have worked in a market where almost everything went up regardless, but it's a much bigger 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 sits, which roads are quiet and which are busy quiet cut-throughs.

That knowledge doesn't transfer from a spreadsheet, and it doesn't come from someone who's flown in for the day.

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.

Importantly, if you can't inspect a property yourself, they know what they're actually looking for — not just ticking boxes on a form.

The Takeaways

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

1.  Know your real borrowing capacity - both versions of it. With negative gearing and without. The gap between the two numbers is about to matter a lot more for many investors.
2.  Understand your runway. Know whether your buffer holds for two years or six, and make sure the property you buy fits the runway you actually have — not the one you assumed you had.
3. Insist on local expertise. A decade or more living and working in the specific market, not a national brand with a fly-in service.
4. Never hand over the orders. A buyer's agent should be the one executing a strategy — not the one setting it.

The market that's coming 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, has already worked out what "best" looks like for your situation.'

Are you wondering how you should invest in this interesting phase of the property cycle?

If you're like many property investors, you're probably wondering what's the right thing to do at present.

Should you buy, should you sell, or should you just wait?

You can trust the team at Metropole to provide you with direction, guidance, and results.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced investor, at times like we are currently experiencing you need an advisor who takes a holistic approach to your wealth creation and that’s exactly what you get from the multi-award-winning team at Metropole.

We help our clients grow, protect and pass on their wealth through a range of services including:

1. Strategic property advice – Allow us to build a Strategic Property Plan for you and your family.  Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now! Click here to learn more
2. Buyer’s agency – As Australia’s most trusted buyers’ agents we’ve been involved in over $4Billion worth of transactions creating wealth for our clients and we can do the same for you. Our on the ground teams in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane bring you years of experience and perspective – that’s something money just can’t buy. We’ll help you find your next home or an investment-grade property.  Click here to learn how we can help you.
3. Property Development - We enable you to become an “armchair developer” and get all the benefits of property development without getting your hands dirty. We take the hassles out of your investment by assisting you with all the expertise you need, from concept to completion, including construction. Click here to see if it’s the right way for you to grow your portfolio.
4. Property Management – Our stress-free property management services help you maximise your property returns. Click here to find out why our clients enjoy a vacancy rate considerably below the market average, our tenants stay an average of 3 years, and our properties lease 10 days faster than the market average.