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GOOD MORNING FROM ELITE AGENT 👋 Good morning, and welcome to The Brief for Friday 7 August 2026. |
TRUE OR FALSE? The world’s first "squatter's rights" law required someone to occupy an abandoned house for a full 10 years before they could claim the deed. (Scroll to the bottom for the answer!) |
In today's edition of The Brief - Ten percent of clients will love you, ten percent won't – the 80-10-10 rule shows why the other 80 are the ones worth listening to.
- Domain's parent just posted its first profitable residential quarter ($12 million, after last year's $76 million loss) – handy intel next time a vendor asks about the portals.
- One buyer, two years of searching, zero faith in agents – how an off-market match in Tarneit turned it all around in under a week.
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TODAY'S FEATURE  The 80-10-10 rule that changes how you take feedbackTen percent of clients will love you. Ten percent will think you're the worst agent they've ever met. The other 80 percent hold the answer most agents never learn to read properly. A mentor's decades-old rule reframes how you process every review, every negotiation debrief and every difficult vendor call – and it starts with resisting the urge to react in the first 24 hours. |
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What you'll learn in the full article: - The 24-hour rule: why the speed of your response to a bad review matters less than what you do in the day before you send it.
- The law of small numbers: why one scathing review feels like the whole story, and the simple fix top agents use to stop it distorting their confidence.
- The 80-10-10 split: the exact three groups every agent's feedback falls into, and which one your career should actually be built around.
Read the full article → |
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DEPT OF MARKETING  Domain's owner posts first profitable quarterCoStar Group's Residential division, home to Domain, has turned Adjusted EBITDA positive for the first time – $12 million, against a $76 million loss a year ago. Revenue for the segment jumped 33 per cent, and CEO Andy Florance says the company now expects its highest-ever full-year result. |
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DEPT OF DATA  Jellis Craig calls Melbourne the bottom of the cycleAndrew McCann thinks Melbourne is as good value as it's been in years, with median house prices sitting at 7.1 times household income. Rental vacancy has dropped to 1.2 per cent, so he expects today's tenants to become tomorrow's buyers. "Buyers will look back on this period as the bottom of the cycle," Andrew says. Read the full article → |
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DEPT OF COMMERCIAL  Five lease mistakes that cost repeat commercial clientsHarcourts' head of commercial says the real test of a lease isn't the signing, it's three years later when a client outgrows the space or gets stung by hidden outgoings. The fix starts at the brief: stress-test growth, model total occupancy cost, and get involved twelve to eighteen months before expiry, not after a tenant's already locked in. |
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HOW IT SOLD  An off-market match for a wary buyerAfter nearly two years of searching, one buyer had lost faith in agents. Jalpa Patel and Jerry Jacob of YPA Tarneit-Truganina matched her with an off-market, owner-occupied home in Tarneit, sealing $640,000 in under a week – well above the suburb's $580,000 median. Find out the story behind how it sold → Your competitors know media coverage gets clients. Are you ready to get yours? getailsa.com → |
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CELEBRITY HOMES  Malibu-style estate lists on the Thames for £5.5MPicture a Malibu beach house, stilts and all, dropped onto a private island near Windsor. Friary House was rebuilt in 2016 as a near-exact copy of the owner's sister's California home, complete with gold fish-scale tiles, a resistance pool and 150ft of river frontage. As Soren Ravaux at Waterview puts it: "This isn't a house that borrows a few Californian details – it brings the character of Malibu coastal living to the Thames." Read the full article → |
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MOVERS & SHAKERS  Ray White celebrates top performers across Commercial and Rural Networks in FY26Ray White recognised its leading agents and top offices for FY26 during back-to-back annual awards ceremonies in Sydney. Canberra’s Frank Giorgi won Commercial’s highest individual honour, the Director’s Cup, while Matt Cleary took home Top Salesperson for the Rural network.  Jason Cook joins The Agency in GeelongArmstrong Creek to Highton, Leopold and beyond – Jason Cook knows the patch well after eight years specialising in Geelong real estate, part of more than two decades in sales and service. He's now joined The Agency as property partner, adding local depth to the brand's presence across Greater Geelong. |
 Daniel Robinson – building an attraction business on the Mornington PeninsulaFifty-two settlements and $943,900 in commissions in just six months have pushed Daniel Robinson to fourth on realestate.com.au across the entire Mornington Peninsula, running the numbers with a team of just two. Three years into building his business through Area Specialist, he puts the growth down to leaning into an "attraction" model – heavier marketing spend, sharper client selection, and skipping the cold-call grind. He's now carrying that approach into a bigger year ahead. |
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AGENTS ON SOCIAL Door knocking but make it something the ethics committee cannot prove you did. ✊💸 |
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TRUE OR FALSE: The world’s first "squatter's rights" law required someone to occupy an abandoned house for a full 10 years before they could claim the deed. And the answer is … False - it only took three years! The Code of Hammurabi (circa 2250 BC) featured the earliest known adverse possession laws. If an ancient Babylonian owner abandoned their property and skipped out on their taxes, anyone who moved in and paid the bills for 36 months got to keep the place. For comparison, Australian laws heavily favour the original property owner, giving them well over a decades notice before they lose their rights. via Indiana International & Comparative Law Review. |
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