Real estate guru COMES OUT on claims that agents are paid too much – as he predicts a bumper 2024 despite interest rate woes

An Australian property insider predicts the next 12 months will be among the ‘best years for property sales in history’ – while also dismissing the perception that people in the sector are being overpaid.

Sydney auctioneer Tom Panos, the founder of Real Estate Gym, said in a clip recently shared on his social media that 2024 will be a banner year for real estate, despite continued exorbitant prices, recent interest rate hikes and the threat of more. come.

“I’m not entirely sure what the situation will be with interest rates and with price growth and decline, but it is very, very clear that people want to transact,” Mr. Panos said.

“It’s very clear that people have accepted that these are the property values ​​we are learning to live with.”

Sydney has some of the highest property prices in the world, with the average house price having risen a further 12.1 per cent since January to a staggering $1.397 million, data from CoreLogic showed.

Queensland is also seeing near-record prices in many areas, deterring young people from entering the property market as population growth soars.

Mr Panos also responded to a question about whether “real estate agents are overpaid” and thus contributed to the cost burden on buyers, but emphasized that this is not the case.

“There are a lot of things that the average consumer doesn’t see: agents list properties, they manage their pipeline, they do callbacks, they do vendor management, they do vendor reporting,” Mr. Panos said.

He continued: “They do warm prospecting, they work with multiple warm buyers up to 25 at a time, they work in the community, they close deals, they manage their calendar and do emails.

‘They attend settlements, they make sure their social media is on track, they attend appraisals, pest inspections and pre-settlements – they do all that and if the property doesn’t sell they get zero, so I don’t think that they are paid too much.’

Mr Panos, who provides coaching for those in property sales, said agents have a good chance of earning commissions in the next 12 months if they take advantage of the competitive market.

The scale of the current housing bubble has even shocked the new Reserve Bank governor, Michele Bullock, who said at an international conference this week that “house prices are rising again, to everyone’s surprise.”

Prices continue to rise despite official interest rates at a 12-year high of 4.35 percent, and above six percent for mortgage holders.

Monthly variable mortgage repayments have risen by 69 percent since May 2022, when cash rates were still at a record low of 0.1 percent.

Mr Panos, who runs the Real Estate Gym, also said he doesn’t think people in the industry are paid too much because they do a lot of work.

During the extended lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne in 2021, banks offered fixed mortgage rates starting with a ‘two’.

But now the variable mortgage interest rate is approaching the seven percent limit for people with a twenty percent down payment.

Although variable rate borrowers are forced to absorb the increase in monthly repayments, many fixed rate borrowers are not yet affected by the increases.

The Reserve Bank expects 880,000 fixed mortgage rates to expire in 2023, followed by another 450,000 next year – meaning more than 1.3 million borrowers would have felt the pinch by next year.

Those moving to a higher standard variable would pay 3.33 percentage points above the RBA cash rate, according to RateCity.

This would cause many borrowers to abruptly switch to a variable interest rate of 7.68 percent unless they refinance.