Newstalk ZB Matt Heath&Tyler Adams Afternoons, show from July 15th 2025
Do Real Estate Agents get you more money than if you sell it yourself?
I was listening to NewstalkZB, I love that radio station, I get all the relevant information from there about this country and the world and I love the afternoon show. The 2 lads, Matt Heath and Tyler Adams are doing very well, they had very big shoes to fill in after the departure of the 2 former presenters and it only proves that everyone can be replaced even though we sometimes think that we can’t be.
The topic was if the real estate agents get you more money than if you sell it yourself or if it’s wise to sell privately. I would like analyze what I heard on that show and unfortunately I heard a lot of misinformation and sometimes just pure gibberish.
The show kicked off with Tyler stating that he couldn’t deal with questions at Open Homes if he was selling his house himself and that he can save himself ‘a hell of a lot of faf’ by handing it to a real estate agent who would do it for him. He said that an average commission was $30,000, these boys are from Christchurch, up in Auckland $30K commission would cover a 1-bedroom apartment, maybe a smaller townhouse, probably some houses in South Auckland. I don’t understand how Tyler can do talkback and find it hard to answer questions at Open Homes. The other thing, these lads must be on a very big money, $30,000 doesn’t seem to bother Tyler to hand over for a few Open Homes, a bit of negotiation, answer a few questions.
They had a texter who pointed out the same, that $30K commission wasn’t going to cover a lot and they asked ‘what about a $3M house?’, Matt chimed in and said ‘yeah but what about an agent would increase the value from $2.9M to $3M?, then ‘well with that, right?’. Well not so right, the fact that an agent would increase that value is the biggest psychological mind game the real estate industry plays with us ‘we will get you more’, as a fact the real estate agents compete amongst themselves ‘we will get you more than others’. Let’s play this game called ‘we will get you more’ and I’ll give you a quick calculation, the commission on a $3M house is $95,000, that means if a real estate agent increases the value for you from $2.9M to $3M and that ‘if’ is a huge hypothetical ‘IF’, then you going to put $95,000 in their pockets and you will be $5,000 better off.
Matt asked if it was essential to use a real estate agent when selling a property, and he was very consistent throughout the whole show that ‘yes it was’, I understand they have to take stands and maybe it was just the stand he was instructed to take. He quoted a property data firm COTALITY and they suggested that agents seem to sell a property more quickly and effectively. I didn’t know much about COTALITY so I had to look them up and I have to say I’m none wiser now, I didn’t see that suggestion but it is a webpage designed for real estate agents, to equip them with ‘tools, data and insights so they can move with speed in a fast changing markets, finding and nurturing buyers and sellers to win listings, build trust, save time and deliver more for their clients’. Look I will be straight up to the point, I believe you have to be highly educated to understand these websites, I can’t see how mums and dads or 1st home buyers would benefit from that site.
The 1st caller was Rosie, a real estate agent of 30+years and understandably she was blowing her own trumpet. She said that she would get another agent to sell her own property. Yes you read this well, I want to reiterate what she had said ‘she wouldn’t want to sell her own property’, I know, it’s mindblowing, she said ‘I always get another agent to sell mine because I don’t want to be in a direct contact with the buyer because it’s kind of hard, people can say all sorts of things and they may not like it and they may tell you why they don’t like it which can be hard to accept sometimes’. If I had a chance to be on that show I would’ve asked her ‘what can you sell Rosie when you can’t sell your own house?’, not everyone likes your house Rosie, there are people who like it, there are those who don’t, there’s literally nothing to be afraid of, people do say all sorts of things and everyone is entitled to their own opinions. If 1 out of 10 people would like your house, you are on a winning path Rosie.
She said that some people ‘feel uncomfortable dealing with it themselves and they didn’t want to do the Open Homes’ and she’s is damn right, if you feel uncomfortable selling your own house like Rosie is and you don’t want to do Open Homes you need to contact a Real Estate Agent and they will do it for you. It’s going to cost you but they will do it for you. Corban+Dallas is for people who are comfortable with their own houses, you know what you’ve got, you’ve got a good quality home, you have nothing to hide, you are comfortable taking people through, talking to them. If you don’t have these qualities, you have to contact real estate agents and they will do it for you.
She carried on with a story how someone was attempting to do it themselves only to realize that it was too much of a job and they were happy to hand it over to Rosie to finish it off. She likened the real estate to flying planes, ‘it’s like anything you don’t have experience with, you wouldn’t want to get into a plane and try to fly it because it wouldn’t go well’. Rosie Real Estate is not flying planes, all she needs to look at is where all the real estate agents came from, they literally came from everywhere, any job or a profession you can possibly think of. You can become a real estate agent after you do a 3-day course, you can come from any background, it’s probably the most unregulated industry you can possibly think of, all you need is a 3-days course and 1 assignment.
She said that most vendors want more than what the market value is and that she ‘needs to guide them the right way’. In other words she needs to explain a vendor they not going to get what they hoping for.
They asked her if she believed she can sell a house for more than if it was sold privately by the vendor, she replied ‘I personally believe that’ and that she had proved that several times, how would she know if the vendor was selling it privately and they would’ve got exactly the same plus they wouldn’t need to pay for the commission? She said ‘we know how to negotiate and most people aren’t negotiators’, there you go, you need Rosie to negotiate that deal for you because you wouldn’t know how to do that.
At Corban+Dallas I’m happy to guide you through the negotiations provided you know what you want. I’ll explain all the little tips&tricks and sneaky techniques. I believe I know them all but you know what they say? ‘We learn every day’.
Tyler capped it off with saying ‘I’ll be using Rosie, she sold me’, remember Tyler is the one who doesn’t mind paying $30,000 in commission and who thinks that Real Estate is too much ‘FAF’.
The 2nd caller was Gary who sold a couple of houses on his own as a private sale in the past 12 years. He said ‘I don’t know why would you want to pay someone $30K to $80K to $100K to sit in your house and say here’s a kitchen, there’s a bathroom’. Well done Gary, you are on it, there’s a little bit more to it than just showing where the kitchen and bathroom is but overall you nailed it.
He recalled a story that a real estate agent sold once his house before it went on the market and they had to pay $40K or $50K and they didn’t even print the brochures, he asked ‘why are we spending so much money?’. Gary you would’ve had a very good real estate agent and a very cunning one, you paid $50K and the house didn’t even hit the market. Imagine how much would you sell it for if it went on the market?
They asked him if he was positive that he wouldn’t have got more had he listed the houses with a real estate agent, his answer was ‘we got more for what the real estate agents had appraised it for’. Once again Gary, well done, looks like you don’t even need Corban+Dallas to assist you with, you know what you doing, you on it.
They tried to skew the conversation that it would’ve been in a good market when he was selling and that now was a different market and that the real estate agents have a database of buyers. There is no ‘database of buyers’, they collect data from people who come through Open Homes, there is no such thing as a ‘Database of buyers’, next time when you contact a real estate agent ask them if they can pull a buyer from their ‘database’, if they tell you they are going to have to advertise the property and do the Open Homes ask them ‘where’s your database of buyers?’.
Gary wrapped it up with saying that if someone likes your house and it ticks all the boxes, the price is right, they don’t care who they buying from, whether it’s a real estate or a private sale, once again ‘go Gary’.
The 3rd caller was Ethan and he was thinking of selling and surprise surprise he was undecided and asked the one basic fundamental question, he said they sold 2 houses in the past through real estate agents and every time $20K-$25K came off his pocket and he went on to say that he was thinking of selling privately this time around but ‘does that sort of gets cancelled out by the fact that an agent might sell it for say $50K more?’. Ethan this is the single most strategic way how the real estate industry is trying to scare people off to do it themselves, ‘we can get you more than you doing it yourself’, ‘we know how to do it because you don’t have the experience/expertise’, ‘we know how to talk to buyers because you’re not qualified to do that’.
What about you ask yourself these questions?
- Do you want to get the maximum from your house or do you want to part with equity of your house?
- Do you want to put money into someone’s pockets who has zero entitlement to your biggest asset, your house?
- Do you want to fund someone else’s lifestyle who has absolutely no relation to you Ethan?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions Ethan, you’d need to contact a real estate agent to sell your property because at Corban+Dallas we believe at maximizing the profits, keeping the money to yourself and not leaving it on the table for someone else. We market your property, we guide you through the process of sale, negotiations, we’ll organize the auction for you, we’ll show you all the little dirty tricks that you might be played on and if that isn’t enough for you then you need to talk to a real estate agent.
Tyler or Matt suggested that a real estate agent is incentivized by the commission, this is and isn’t true. A real estate agent is incentivized by sale, it’s a brutal industry, they have to sell to be paid of, no sell – no pay, the top real estate agents take on 55% of what is offered to them, the rest is passed on to junior agents, they are not interested in having a property advertized, they don’t want to do Open Homes a week after week, they want to do a 3 week campaign, sell at an auction, or even better before auction, unconditionally, pocket the commission and move on to another property.
Yes I can hear them screaming ‘this is not true’, ‘we want to get the maximum for our vendors’, or even better what one agent once told me that the commission wasn’t even important, when I asked what was important?, he said ‘a customer satisfaction’.
They asked Ethan if he was satisfied with the both sales and if everything went well, ‘was there any resentment? (apart from shelling out the money in commission)’, he said ‘yeah nah we had a very good agent, we got a little bit under what she had told us’ (that was Rosie), ‘but yeah, we thought we’d get more for it but pretty happy with her, she was really good’. Ethan you got what you got and you were happy with the agent.
Tyler went on to summarize with ‘I’d say straight up I’d always use a real estate agent because I couldn’t be bothered with the FAF and having to deal with the negotiations’ and according to COTALITY the median time of a property sitting on the market for a real estate agent was 24 days while it was 40 for a private sale, and that would make me a bit nervous because there’s a cost involved in that. ‘If the house is sitting on the market for almost double the time then it’s going to cost you’.
As I said Corban+Dallas is not for Tyler Adams and likes of him, if you can’t be bothered with the FAF and having to deal with negotiations and ‘countless hours’ of Open Homes, how many hours of Open Homes you do Tyler?, you don’t need to take time off work?, you do it on the weekends, your show is only on the weekdays.
At the very end Ethan suggested that he might use AI for some of the work when selling privately, I wish him well, maybe he can come up with a way of AI doing Open Homes and negotiating for him, Tyler would be stoked.
Matt&Tyler received a text from someone who claimed they would never buy from anyone privately because in private sale the vendor does not have to disclose issues such as leaks etc., whereas agents must disclose under their obligations. On this note I would like to say that it’s exactly the other way around, if you have any known issues with your property you will be liable later on as a private seller. If you have anything you don’t want to disclose, you pass it on the real estate agent and they will sell it on your behalf. If anything comes back later on, you wash your hands and say ‘I’m sorry guys it wasn’t me selling it, it was the real estate agent’. You are liable as a private seller, you can be sued.
The 4th caller Josie, a real estate agent, said there were always 2 sides of the story, that there is a really messy state of the market right now, lots of people bailing out from their properties because the interest rates hurt them and there are lots of people who don’t have any equity in their property. She said ‘if the buyer thinks they paying a tad too much and the vendors think they not getting quite enough then I can guarantee to you that the price is about right’, a very interesting take, I gather from that statement that her vendors know how much their property is worth hence they shouldn’t really need to use a real estate agent.
She went on talking about Anti Money Laundering. She said if you were selling privately you would have to go either through a lawyer or get registered and passed for anti money laundering. I personally had not heard a bigger nonsense than this. First and foremost, you must have a property lawyer in any real estate transaction Josie, you buy, you sell, you must have a lawyer. I honestly don’t know what Josie was on about when she brought this up into the arena. She, as a real estate agent, has nothing to do with settlement. She does not control the flow of the money, the money goes through banks, lending institutions and lawyers, they have the obligation to carry out these checks. She only receives her blimming commission from the New Zealand Real Estate Trust where the 10% deposit had been paid by the buyer when the sale becomes unconditional and where it would have been sitting for 10 days, from there the Trust deducts the real estate commission and the rest of the 10% deposit goes to vendor’s lawyer and I can bet with you she wouldn’t care less where the money came from.
I’m absolutely amazed where she got all this nonsense from, as I have previously said people say all sorts of things these days, this is just one of those WTF moments right up there.
She said that 5 years ago real estate was a wonderful industry to be in, ‘we had buyers and sellers’, ‘but now there’s too much competition out there’.
She talked about 3P’s, price-presentation-position, she said you can’t do anything about the position but the other 2P’s are very much in your hand, she said she had a crew of builders and chippies, painters and was able to bring a property up to standards in 14 days. She said ‘you have to cut through the noise and I’m pretty jolly sure I can get a premium site in this competitive market’, if you want to get a top dollar, you going to have to spend a bit more and that is actually true.
She reckons she has an edge above the others because she can ask the right questions, to keep in touch with the buyers ‘what did you think about this property?’, ‘how does it sit with other properties you’ve seen over the weekend?’. Jossie I went to have a look at an apartment in Auckland’s Newmarket, I left there a backup phone number, I had 9 missed phone calls and numerous text messages from 2 different numbers in 3 days, messages that were nothing short of desperate, I understand times are tough, you don’t need to hassle and pester people just because they came through an Open Home, if someone’s interested they will surely give you a ring back and that’s the people you want to work with. My honest advice to anyone going to an Open Home, ‘do not leave your primary phone number with a real estate agent’, they will harass you, follow you, they will annoy the shit out of you. You call me and ask me ‘where does it sit with other properties I’ve seen on the weekend?’, none of your business, I love when a real estate agent asks you ‘how much is your budget?’, ‘my budget is sufficient’ is my answer, that’s all what you need to know. The question ‘how much is your budget?’ can be easily paraphrased as ‘how much money can I get out of you?’.
She carried on with how much information she gathers from the vendors before she takes on a listing, like has the house been repilled?, insulation, wiring etc. The thing is she will never know everything. The beauty of selling or buying privately is you talking to the vendors, you see the people who have lived in the property, you getting an idea what the property is like, they tell you about the pros and cons of the house, about their neighbours, you don’t talk to pretty girls or good looking blokes you talking to the vendors, people who live in that home. There’s no one between you and the vendor. No real estate agent can give you a more relevant answer than people who actually live in that particular house.
And it wouldn’t have been Tyler or Matt trying to trump it up with some even bigger non-sense, ‘you’ve got to disclose if you’re on a flood plan, that you have that documentation, if you selling privately, you wouldn’t need to?’, ‘there’s stuff they don’t need to disclose if selling privately because they are not under REAA’. It’s called LIM report Matty, you need to ask this from the vendor, the vendor obtains it either from their lawyer or they ask the local council, you ask for the title, these documentation will each vendor have ready for you, they will email it to you. Regarding leaky homes or any faults, the buyer needs to do a building report, you don’t rely on the building report supplied by the vendor. It’s called due diligence and it is the buyers responsibility, it does not matter if you are buying privately or through a real estate it is and always has been the buyers responsibility. Your argument that ‘at least a real estate agent is registered’, so what?, is that going to save you that a real estate agent is registered?, they won’t sell you a duck because they are registered? How many stories have I read on this topic? If there’s something you don’t want to disclose, pass the property on a real estate agent and they will sell it on your behalf. If you’ve got a good property you won’t need to do this, sell it privately using Corban+Dallas brand and their expertise to guide through the process.
When Tyler brought this leaky home again, Josie said ‘they can be sued later on’, even Josie knew this is a lie. She carried on with having a big whinge that the banks are not wanting to lend finance for properties sitting on a flood prone areas and unconsented works, not issued CCC (code compliance certificate in building and construction, a legal document confirming work meets the building consent and code, essential for selling property). Josie the banks are your business partner when purchasing a property, they want their money to be secured, they won’t let someone to take out finance on a property and later default, they don’t want to go through mortgages sales, they want people to borrow the money from them and pay it back as agreed in terms and conditions, the principle and interests. Insurance companies are another level, you won’t get insurance if the property is in a flood prone area. From what she said I gathered that she was selling a property and the buyer couldn’t obtain finance and insurance due to the property being on a flood plan or not issued CCC, Josie you represent vendor, if the buyer wasn’t able to get finance or insurance due to the before mentioned reasons that wasn’t their fault, that was your fault. She topped it off with saying ‘if you want to go to a dentist, you want to get a top dentist not just some dentist who wants to make money’ and this is another great analogy from a real estate agent.
The last caller was Ben Kean, a former real estate agent turned entrepreneur. Now I would love to publish all his details, however he was very hard to understand, he was sort of mumbling and muttering his words, I will put the link of the whole show at the very end for everyone to listen to, if you can get more than what I got.
This is what I gathered from what he said, he was the founder of a private sale company called Fizz Total NZ, I can’t look him up, must be wrong spelling. He said they were a startup and they were bridging the gap between a normal private sale and what real estate agents do, leveraging technology effectively through their service. They do marketing and even Open Homes, they must be REAA registered, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do the Open Homes for someone else. They have a system or as he called it a platform where the buyers can express their interest to a vendor and that system behaves or evaluates it as if it was a Trademe auction, the system can deal with multiple bids and offers even if they are conditional. He went on to elaborate but they cut him off, he was hard to understand and not easy to listen to, they asked him if he was reading it off his website or a paper. He didn’t like it, he said ‘I’m giving you some background so you guys know what’s available on the market, I know you guys are sponsored by real estate agents’, they didn’t like that remark, they laughed it off saying they weren’t but they didn’t like it. The truth is that a few other shows on NewstalkZB are sponsored by real estate companies. The Mike Hosking show in the morning is sponsored by Bayleys Real Estate, Heather du Plassis Allen at 4pm is sponsored by I can’t remember what Real Estate puts money in her show, these are award wining journos, highly respected, great shows to listen to.
He said he wasn’t knocking off the agents because he used to be one himself and that there are people who are happy to pay the commission and that there are who aren’t, that’s a fair comment, and that ‘they were bridging that gap’. I personally love bridging the gaps.
He said he would always recommend the buyers to do their own due diligence and get their own building reports so they can rely upon their own information. He didn’t need to recommend that, it is the buyer’s responsibility, every buyer would be told this by their lawyer, ‘you need to do your own due diligence’, the lawyer will help to review the LIM report and title, it is the buyers responsibility to carry out the building report. Tyler with Matt would tell you ‘the agents are registered under REAA’, it does not matter, the agents would not give monkeys, it is your job as a buyer to do due diligence.
He capped it off with saying that he couldn’t negotiate for buyers, I’m only thinking ‘who is he actually representing?’, the buyer or the vendor?, or maybe both?, and that a lot of stuff can be automated these days and that with the upcoming AI there’s a huge risk for the incumbent real estate industry.
At Corban+Dallas we don’t have a platform or system that evaluates offers or bids, the only platform is me and you, I tailor all the systems and solutions at a particular client, situation, there’s a lot to take in each particular situation, if the property goes to the auction, that’s one platform, if it doesn’t sell at the auction I will guide you through the offers after the auction, there would be conditions attached to these offers, there’s a few scenarios that may occur and I would explain once the situation arises. I’m not very good at AI, my understanding is it is already here, you can write the property description with AI, you can’t do Open Homes with AI, can you?, can you negotiate with AI?, I don’t think so.
If Ben reckons he can do things with automation and AI I’d say ‘go for it’, it’s not the path I’m taking.