The Client Is The Battlefield

Oct 1
The Brand Within.

Part Two of Five — A Way of Life Series.
The Client Is the Battlefield.
When an industry builds competition into its commission structures — reward the win, ignore the cost — someone has to absorb that cost. It is rarely the agency. It is almost always the person who walked in trusting that the agent worked for them.

Underquoting is the clearest version of this. Consumer Affairs Victoria has taken Ray White Judd White Group to the Federal Court over eleven properties, alleging its agents manipulated "blind pricing" so buyers believed homes sat inside their budget when they didn't. In a related case against Ray White Oakleigh, investigators allege agents privately messaged each other guessing — in some instances betting — how far above the advertised figure a home would actually sell, while quoting buyers the lower number in public. One vendor was reportedly told the underquoting was simply "all strategy."

This is not a pricing error. A price estimate that's wrong by accident doesn't require two parties agreeing in writing to call it strategy. It requires a culture where beating the other side of the negotiation — buyer, seller, doesn't matter which — has become the actual job description.
The vendor isn't safe either.

It's worth being precise about who gets hurt, because the industry likes to frame underquoting as only a buyer problem. It isn't. In an earlier Federal Court case, Hoskins Maroondah was found to have engaged in misleading conduct and false representations toward prospective buyers — and separately, unconscionable conduct toward its own two vendor clients. The people paying that agency's commission were among the people it was found to have wronged.

Fletcher & Parker was fined $880,000 for the same underlying practice. Its CEO apologised publicly, calling the conduct something that ran counter to the business's own stated values. Whether or not that was genuine, it came only after Victoria's underquoting taskforce caught it — which is the pattern worth noticing. The apology arrives on schedule, after the enforcement. The culture that made the apology necessary was already running the business beforehand, uninterrupted.

Conditional selling: the client as territory.

In the UK, a Panorama investigation found one of the country's largest agencies operating a "Hot Buyers" board — a shortlist of purchasers who'd agreed to use the agency's own mortgage and conveyancing services, reportedly favoured over other buyers because they generated up to £10,000 in extra revenue per sale. A Connells customer, Julie Gallagher, told the programme she believed her sale had been steered against her own interests.

"I feel angry and conned."
Julie Gallagher, Connells customer, speaking to BBC Panorama
The same investigation caught a Purplebricks team leader telling staff there was still "a heinous amount of money to be made" and to squeeze every lead for as much as it had. First-time buyers Ryan Evans and Olivia Phelps paid nearly three times the going rate for conveyancing after being told not to bother getting a comparison quote. Ryan's own words to the programme were simple.

He said maybe they had taken advantage of us a bit, because he and Olivia were first-time buyers with nothing to measure the price against.

allAgents, a UK review platform, separately pointed to Purplebricks' own customer feedback data showing only a 40% valuation accuracy rate — meaning, by the agency's own numbers, three in five properties it valued were overvalued. That figure didn't come from a regulator. It came from the company's own records, sitting in plain view the whole time.

What "competing for the client" actually means.
None of this reads as one bad agent making one bad call. It reads as an industry where the client has quietly become the terrain two internal interests compete over — the agent's commission target against the client's actual outcome — and where winning that internal competition is what gets rewarded on Friday, whatever it cost the person who walked in on Monday believing someone was working for them.

The next piece in this series turns the same lens inward — because an industry that trains its people to treat the client as something to be beaten doesn't stop there. It eventually turns the same logic on its own.

Chris Arnold — Founder, The Brand Within
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