As a principal leading a sales team, you will have noticed that 2026 presented some very different challenges to 2025. The biggest of them was a shifting market, and a shifting market is a hard thing for a sales team to work in. Your buyers know it has shifted, and they have adjusted what they are willing to pay. A lot of your sellers still have not, and they are anchored to the prices they were hearing about twelve months ago. Through the year, that gap between what a buyer will pay and what a seller expects only gets wider.
By now most people have come to accept, in a general sense, that the market has moved, and the media has done plenty to help everyone get there. The trouble is that a seller agreeing the market is down in general does not mean they accept it about their own home. In their mind, theirs is the exception. It is nicer, it is better presented, it is in the better part of the street. That belief is what makes the sale in front of you so much harder than the headline would suggest.
When prices are falling, the line I hear again and again from agents is that it is not the price. I understand why it gets said, but let me give you a real example. An office I was speaking with only this morning had an average sale price of around $1 million three months ago. Two months ago it was down to $900,000. By October it was heading for the mid-sevens. Prices drop, they level out for a while, and then they drop again. In a market moving that quickly, a property priced to where things were even a couple of months ago is already behind.
What do we do about that as leaders? The first thing is we have to get very good at talking to our owners honestly about what the price of their property needs to be to sell today. Not what it would have made last year, and not what the neighbour got in a different market. That means sitting down with the evidence of what is selling right now, and being willing to have the uncomfortable conversation rather than taking the listing at a number you already know is wrong.
The alternative is worse for everyone. A property that launches at yesterday’s price does not beat the market; it chases it. It sits, enquiries are slow, you carry the marketing, and weeks later you are back in front of the owner asking for the reduction you could have had at the start. By the time it finally sells, it usually sells for less than it would have if it had been priced right on day one, and the owner has had a longer, harder and more expensive run to get there.
There is a question I like to put to principals. It is a ridiculous question, yet one that is worth putting to yourself right now.
If all of your stock was half price, would it be sold?
I told you it was a ridiculous question. Of course, and the answer is obviously yes.
The reason it is worth asking is that for most properties, the price that sells sits somewhere between half price and where you have it listed today. None of us are talking about giving property away. We are talking about finding that honest number, and the sooner you find it, the better the result for your owner.
That is the first focus, getting your prices right. The second is the one I really want to leave you with, because it is the one that risks being forgotten in a market like this. You have to have stock. You have to have listings to work with.
What tends to happen in a falling market is that some agents go quiet on listing. They look at the list-to-sell ratio blowing out, they worry about carrying marketing costs on properties that are slow to move, and a few of them start to wonder whether houses can be sold at all right now, and they pull back and wait. I understand the instinct, but it is the wrong one. The agents who keep listing through a market like this are the ones building the stock, holding their share of the market, and sitting in the best position when things turn, as they eventually do. The ones who pull back have to start again from nothing when confidence returns.
And in the meantime, the maths is simple. If you do not have listings, you have nothing to work with. No stock to sell, and no people to work with. Everything we do in this business starts with having something on the board.
On that note, we are hosting a webinar on the 9th of December on exactly this: how to make January, the first month of 2027, a great listings month and get the year off to a flying start. When you have stock, you have something to work with and people to work with, and when you have people to work with, you can make sales.
You can register for the 9th of December here.
As a principal leading a sales team, you will have noticed that 2026 presented some very different challenges to 2025. The biggest of them was a shifting market, and a shifting market is a hard thing for a sales team to work in. Your buyers know it has shifted, and they have adjusted what they are willing to pay. A lot of your sellers still have not, and they are anchored to the prices they were hearing about twelve months ago. Through the year, that gap between what a buyer will pay and what a seller expects only gets wider.
By now most people have come to accept, in a general sense, that the market has moved, and the media has done plenty to help everyone get there. The trouble is that a seller agreeing the market is down in general does not mean they accept it about their own home. In their mind, theirs is the exception. It is nicer, it is better presented, it is in the better part of the street. That belief is what makes the sale in front of you so much harder than the headline would suggest.
When prices are falling, the line I hear again and again from agents is that it is not the price. I understand why it gets said, but let me give you a real example. An office I was speaking with only this morning had an average sale price of around $1 million three months ago. Two months ago it was down to $900,000. By October it was heading for the mid-sevens. Prices drop, they level out for a while, and then they drop again. In a market moving that quickly, a property priced to where things were even a couple of months ago is already behind.
What do we do about that as leaders? The first thing is we have to get very good at talking to our owners honestly about what the price of their property needs to be to sell today. Not what it would have made last year, and not what the neighbour got in a different market. That means sitting down with the evidence of what is selling right now, and being willing to have the uncomfortable conversation rather than taking the listing at a number you already know is wrong.
The alternative is worse for everyone. A property that launches at yesterday’s price does not beat the market; it chases it. It sits, enquiries are slow, you carry the marketing, and weeks later you are back in front of the owner asking for the reduction you could have had at the start. By the time it finally sells, it usually sells for less than it would have if it had been priced right on day one, and the owner has had a longer, harder and more expensive run to get there.
There is a question I like to put to principals. It is a ridiculous question, yet one that is worth putting to yourself right now.
If all of your stock was half price, would it be sold?
I told you it was a ridiculous question. Of course, and the answer is obviously yes.
The reason it is worth asking is that for most properties, the price that sells sits somewhere between half price and where you have it listed today. None of us are talking about giving property away. We are talking about finding that honest number, and the sooner you find it, the better the result for your owner.
That is the first focus, getting your prices right. The second is the one I really want to leave you with, because it is the one that risks being forgotten in a market like this. You have to have stock. You have to have listings to work with.
What tends to happen in a falling market is that some agents go quiet on listing. They look at the list-to-sell ratio blowing out, they worry about carrying marketing costs on properties that are slow to move, and a few of them start to wonder whether houses can be sold at all right now, and they pull back and wait. I understand the instinct, but it is the wrong one. The agents who keep listing through a market like this are the ones building the stock, holding their share of the market, and sitting in the best position when things turn, as they eventually do. The ones who pull back have to start again from nothing when confidence returns.
And in the meantime, the maths is simple. If you do not have listings, you have nothing to work with. No stock to sell, and no people to work with. Everything we do in this business starts with having something on the board.
On that note, we are hosting a webinar on the 9th of December on exactly this: how to make January, the first month of 2027, a great listings month and get the year off to a flying start. When you have stock, you have something to work with and people to work with, and when you have people to work with, you can make sales.
You can register for the 9th of December here.
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