Why a 1% commission is the right price for real work — not a discount on the service, but a correction to a fee that was set before technology did half the job.
The word 'cheap' does a lot of work in real estate
Ask a traditional agent what they think of a 1% commission and the first word you tend to hear is cheap. It's a deliberate choice. In a market where most people sell a home once or twice in a lifetime, planting the idea that a lower fee must mean a lower-quality outcome is one of the most effective ways to protect a 2% to 3% baseline.
But cheap and fair are not the same thing. Cheap usually implies something has been taken out to get the price down. Fair means the price matches what the work actually costs to deliver well. Those are different arguments, and the difference matters to every seller on the Gold Coast.
What the 2–3% commission was actually buying in 2002
The fee structure most agencies still run on was normalised in an era of newspaper real-estate sections, glossy printed brochures, shopfront window displays, and a fax machine. Every listing came with real, manual cost: typesetting, offset print runs, couriers, walk-in enquiries that needed to be handed a stapled booklet.
On top of that, the agent themselves was your main source of market information. Comparable sales data wasn't on your phone. You had no independent way to check whether the price was realistic. So the agent's time, knowledge and relationships were genuinely rare resources, and the price reflected that.
A lot of that world is gone, and the rest of it has changed beyond recognition. What hasn't changed — across most agencies — is the headline fee.
What it's actually buying in 2026
Today the buyer journey lives on realestate.com.au and Domain. Listings are built once, syndicated automatically, and maintained from a browser tab. Photography, floor plans and 3D walkthroughs are produced by specialists who shoot hundreds of properties a year at a known, predictable unit cost. Enquiries route to a phone that lives in your pocket and return email alerts push pre-qualified buyers to you without a mail-merge.
The genuinely scarce resources — the things you should be paying well for — are narrower than they used to be. They are: a licensed agent who can price your property realistically using recent comparable sales, who will be honest when the offer on the table is the right one, and who will manage the contract through to settlement without you having to chase them. That is skilled, accountable work, and it deserves a real fee.
What doesn't deserve a fee any more is the shopfront on the main road, the franchise percentage skimmed off the top, the middle-manager who never meets a buyer, and the marketing budget that pays for the agency's next listing pitch instead of yours.
Fair pricing, run the math
A $1.5M Gold Coast home at 2.5% commission plus a conservative $8,000 marketing bill is $45,500 out of the seller's pocket. At 1% plus the same marketing it's $23,000. The difference — $22,500 — is enough to pay for a full year of private-school fees, or to clear 15% of a typical first-home deposit for the sellers' adult children.
The agency doing the 2.5% version isn't doing twice the work. They're often outsourcing to the same photographer, the same floor-plan draughtsperson, the same virtual-staging provider. The 2.5% is the price of the storefront, not the price of the result.
What fair does not mean
Fair doesn't mean stripping out the campaign. We include professional photography with AI enhancement, accurate floor plans, full syndication across the major portals, signage, and experienced negotiation as standard — the same things you'd expect from a premium agency, because those things are what actually move a house.
Fair also doesn't mean that every agent at 1% is the right choice. There are franchised discount models that pay their agents per-transaction and treat listings as volume. That's a race to the bottom on service and it will cost you on the sale price. Being cheap on the wrong thing is false economy. Being fair on the right thing is just discipline.
The test is simple: ask any agent you're interviewing what their campaign includes, how many comparable sales their proposed price is based on, how they'll keep you informed during the campaign, and what happens if the first four weeks don't produce the offer you want. If the answers are confident, specific and written down, you are probably talking to someone fair. The number on the invoice is secondary.