Busting a Real Estate Myth

Paying more for an agent doesn’t necessarily mean a better sale price. One of the biggest issues for sellers is an information black hole.

Sellers don’t actually know how much better one agent is than another. There’s a strong perception that a higher fee will lead to a higher sale price, and that a cheaper agent will do a lower quality job. But there’s no “Trivago for real estate agents” where you can compare outcomes side by side and see what you’d get with one agency versus another.

So what do sellers do instead? They rely on signals — market share, brand recognition, and a bit of herd behaviour. And, to be fair, it’s in the interest of traditional real estate firms to keep that black hole… black.

One rainy morning, four cups of tea, two coffees, ChatGPT, Excel and Property Guru later… I decided to test it.

I analysed 110 sales in Lake Hayes Estate and Lower Shotover, Queenstown, over the past 12 months. I looked at how long each property took to sell and what it achieved relative to RV — essentially, how fast did it sell and how strong was the price against a standard benchmark. I excluded non-market sales, sales with no reported price or agency, and sales that took more than 80 days. Sales with no reported "days to sell" ended up with an arbitrary "1 day".

The result? There’s no strong evidence that premium or high-profile agencies consistently deliver better sale prices.  The scatter graph is very ... scattered.

What the data does show is that variation within agencies is greater than variation between agencies. Some agents get great results, some don’t — and that happens across every brand.

For context, Weka Legal and Real Estate offers one of the lowest-cost real estate plus legal sales models in Queenstown, and we’re achieving results that sit right alongside the rest of the market.

So the assumption that “paying more = getting more” doesn’t really stack up against real data.

A better question for vendors might be: who is the best individual agent for my property, what’s their strategy, and am I genuinely getting value for the fee I’m paying?

Because in the end, the market sets the price — not the logo on the signboard.