Why “how many homes have you bought in this suburb?” is the wrong question to ask a buyers agent
There’s a question buyers in Sydney are increasingly being prompted to ask their buyers agent: how many properties have you bought in this specific suburb?
It sounds like a sharp, specific question. It’s actually the wrong one. The deeper question — the one most buyers haven’t thought to ask — is whether the agent in front of them is running an advisory business or a transaction business. The first is the right kind of practice for a serious purchase. The second isn’t. And the volume question is the transaction model’s preferred way of pretending the distinction doesn’t matter.
Advisory or transaction?
Think for a moment about how you choose other professional advisers.
You don’t pick a lawyer because they file the most matters in the local court. You don’t pick a doctor because they see the most patients in an hour. You don’t pick an accountant because they have ten thousand clients on their books — if anything, that number would worry you. You’d assume you’d never get the time.
You pick the adviser who has chosen their clients carefully, has time to think about your problem, and will be in the room when it actually matters. That’s an advisory business.
A transaction business is the opposite. The advice is light. The engagement is short. The throughput is what’s measured. Volume is the KPI. Both models exist in every professional field. Buyers agency is no different — and the gap between the two is wider than most buyers realise.
The advisory buyers agency, properly run, is a boutique practice. The transaction buyers agency is a factory: built on leverage, optimised for velocity, dependent on volume to make the economics work. They are not different sizes of the same business. They are different businesses entirely. And only one is set up to give you the advice that a serious purchase requires.
A note from Mike Kaye
Before Sarah Kaye & Co., I spent my career in management consulting — most recently as a Global Partner at Accenture, arguably the world’s largest professional services firm. I’ve spent decades inside the leverage model. The partner sells the work. The senior manager scopes it. The associates do most of it. The partner reappears at the steering committees and the close-out. The economics are brutally effective at scale. They are also the wrong economics for advice that has to be acted on personally.
I’m now building a buyers agency the other way. From the inside out. As an advisory practice, not a transaction practice. Senior practitioners doing the work themselves. Sarah and I in the room with every client. No layer between the people selling the engagement and the people delivering it — because we are the same people. That’s the DNA of Sarah Kaye & Co., and it’s the DNA of any boutique buyers agency worth engaging.
A buyers agent does a different job to a sales agent
It’s also worth being clear about what a buyers agent is meant to be doing in the first place — because the volume-in-the-suburb question conflates two genuinely different jobs.
A selling agent — the agent representing the seller — should have intimate, granular knowledge of the postcode they list in. They are selling a specific property, on a specific street, into a specific local market. The unit of expertise is the property. Local depth is the whole job.
A buyers agent is doing the opposite job. We do not represent the property. We represent the buyer. The unit of expertise is you. Testing a buyers agent against a selling agent’s metric produces exactly the wrong answer.
What an advisory buyers agent actually needs to know
By the time we walk into our first inspection together, an advisory buyers agent should know:
Where you have lived, and what about those homes worked and didn’t. What you value, in life as well as in property. The needs you cannot compromise on, separated cleanly from the wants you’ve quietly stopped questioning. Your tolerance for risk: financial, structural, market, lifestyle. The shape of the next three, five, and ten years for you — what this purchase has to deliver across that window. Schools, ageing, work, family, health, the rest.
None of that is in a database. None of it shows up in a transaction count. It is the work you have to do before you tour a single property. It is also the work the volume-driven firms structurally cannot do, because every hour spent on a buyer is an hour subtracted from billable transactions.
Why the volume question is being promoted
The harder it gets to win a brief — and buyers in the last twelve months have been getting noticeably more discerning — the louder the volume claims become. The volume-in-the-suburb question is the factory model’s preferred frame because it’s the metric a factory can win on by definition. Throughput is its entire structural advantage.
If buyers can be quietly nudged into believing volume is the number-one filter for picking a buyers agent, the boutique advisory firms get ruled out before the conversation even starts. The factory wins the only horse race it can run. That, we suspect, is the point.
Why buyers agency hasn’t scaled cleanly
Here’s the part the factory firms don’t want said out loud. Professional services don’t industrialise well. Boutique law practices exist because legal work doesn’t reduce well to a template. Boutique consulting practices exist for the same reason. Some of the most respected names in those fields have stayed deliberately small.
Where firms have tried to industrialise advice, quality has dropped — even where revenue has grown. Buyers agency is no exception. The factories have chased scale and tripped on quality. That is structural, not coincidental. Buying the right home for the right family at the right time is not a process that scales without losing the thing that made it valuable in the first place.
What the volume question doesn’t tell you
A high transaction count says nothing about whether the agent has the negotiating skill to land a fair price under genuine pressure; whether they bought the best property for that particular client, or the property that closed fastest for the firm; what clients said in their post-purchase feedback; whether the firm can run a consultative process when the right answer isn’t on a listing site and the brief has to be rewritten halfway through; or whether the person who pitched you is the person who’ll be in the room with you when it matters.
The transaction itself — the day the contracts exchange — is maybe five percent of the work in a serious buyers brief. For an advisory practice, the other ninety-five percent is the job. For a factory, the transaction is the only KPI that gets measured. That tells you everything about which model is built to deliver what.
The real test
The real test of a buyers agent isn’t how many properties they have bought in your suburb. It is whether they are running an advisory business or a transaction business. Whether the conversation you are having now is the conversation you will keep having on auction day. Whether the principal you are meeting today is the practitioner who’ll be negotiating for you when it counts.
A buyers agency that can answer those questions well is the kind of agency worth paying for. A buyers agency that pivots back to “we’ve bought twelve in this suburb” has just told you exactly which model you are about to engage. That is useful information. It is not the answer to a question you should have been asking.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Kaye is Co-Founder and Director of Sarah Kaye & Co., a boutique, director-led buyers agency working across Sydney’s Northern Suburbs — the Northern Beaches, the Lower North Shore, and the Upper North Shore. Before Sarah Kaye & Co., Mike spent his career in management consulting, most recently as a Global Partner at Accenture, arguably the world’s largest professional services firm. He is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD) and studied property law, valuation, and economics at UNSW. He has previously had articles profiled and quoted in the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, and AICD Magazine. As a Northern Beaches buyers agent, Mike works exclusively for buyers — fixed-fee, no kickbacks, with over 75% of clients’ homes secured off-market.