Inverloch real estate agent Leo Edwards on why the choosing the agent who promises the highest price is often financial suicide, what the data proves, and why it is still legal.

Why the highest quote wins almost every listing presentation

Picture the listing presentations you sat through. Three agents come to your home. Two of us, working from the same recent Bass Coast sales data, land within a similar range.

Then the third agent looks you in the eye and says a number that is fifty, a hundred, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars higher. And just to seal it, that agent also offers a lower fee and a thinner marketing budget.

Which one did you choose?

There are only ever a few levers an agent can pull to win your business. They can discount the fee. They can discount the marketing. Or they can quote a price so high that the seller's common sense vaporises behind dollar signs.

The agents who cannot win on results learn very quickly that the easiest lever of all is simply to say the highest number in the room.

That is not selling your home.

That is buying your signature.

There is a name for what happens after you sign

The industry has a quiet phrase for the months that follow. It is called "conditioning" the vendor, or sometimes "educating" them. It means slowly walking you back down from the fantasy number that won the listing to the real number the market was always going to pay.

This is not my private theory. In 2023 the ABC's Four Corners ran a crowdsourced investigation involving more than one hundred agents, buyers and sellers, and the practice was laid out plainly. One agent with nearly forty years in the industry described the playbook as appraising high without accountability.

He also made the point that matters most to you: there is almost no power for the authorities to catch it, because it is nuanced, it is whispered, and it never appears in writing. Even the peak bodies acknowledge it happens.

The Real Estate Institute of Queensland's chief executive, Antonia Mercorella, put it bluntly in that same investigation: a professional should not inflate a price to win the listing and then condition the vendor down to something lower.

A good agent, she said, should be able to substantiate the number they quote.

There is an old saying among agents who have been around long enough to watch it play out:

quote high and watch it die.

The agent still gets the listing. You still pay for it.

Why your own brain takes the bait

If you fell for the highest number, you are not foolish. You are human, and you were up against two of the most powerful forces in behavioural economics, both first documented by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

The first is anchoring.

The first number you hear becomes the reference point against which every other number is judged.

Once an agent plants $1.2 million in your mind, the honest $950,000 from the agent with the data does not feel like realism. It feels like an insult. The anchor does the persuading before any evidence is even on the table.

The second is loss aversion.

We feel the pain of a loss far more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. Once you are anchored to the high number, every dollar below it feels like money being taken from you, even when it was never real money to begin with. So you wait. You reject the early, fair offer. You hope.

And waiting, as the data will show you in a moment, is precisely the thing that costs you.

This is why the highest quote works as a sales tactic. It is engineered, whether the agent knows the psychology or not, to switch off the part of your judgement that should be reading the comparable sales.

The Australian data has a name for the money you lose

You do not need American studies to understand this, because the Australian industry already measures it and gives it a name. It is called vendor discounting, and it is simply the gap between the first price your home is advertised at and the price it actually sells for.

CoreLogic, now trading as Cotality, tracks it across the country every single month. It is the official Australian measure of exactly the loss this article is about.

Here is the pattern that matters. The longer a property sits, the wider that discount grows. Cotality's data puts the national median time to sell at around 29 days, down from roughly 49 days in 2020, which tells you something simple and important: a fresh, correctly priced Australian home should be transacting in about a month.

When yours drifts well past that, buyers notice, and the discount they extract grows with every week.

And notice how restrained the national numbers are. Even as conditions have softened, the median vendor discount across the combined capital cities has sat in the low single digits, around three per cent.

That is the gentle, normal version. Now hold that three per cent in your mind, because in a moment I am going to show you what overpricing has actually cost sellers right here in Inverloch, and the numbers are not gentle.

The mechanism behind the discount is simple and brutal. Buyers are not stupid. A listing that sits becomes a stale listing, and a stale listing sends one loud signal to every buyer and every buyer's agent watching: something is wrong with this one.

Then comes the first price reduction, which buyers read not as a fair correction but as blood in the water. By the time you finally meet the market, the very buyers who would have paid a strong price in week two are circling, waiting to punish you with a low offer, because you have taught them that you are the seller who got it wrong.

Correctly priced from day one, your home sells into competition while it is fresh. Overpriced from day one, it sells into suspicion after the demand has drained away. The agent who promised you the most has, in almost every case, set you up to receive the least.

The Inverloch graveyard is already on the public record

You do not have to take any of this on faith, because it has already happened, here, to your neighbours, and the figures are public.

When I analysed every Inverloch sale across 2025, two hundred and four of them, the median sale took 139 days and the average dragged out to 192. Hidden inside those averages were ten properties that needed price cuts of twenty-five per cent or more, and they sat on the market for an average of 449 days.

These were not bad homes in bad streets. They were good homes that started at a number designed to win a listing rather than win a buyer.

Look at what that cost real owners:

• A View Street home listed at $1,295,000 sold for $865,000 after 629 days. 

• A Victoria Street home listed at $1,450,000 sold for $860,000 after 443 days.

• A Pier Road property listed at $1.87 million sold for $1.14 million after 622 days.

• A Cuttriss Street home listed at $1.295 million sold for $928,000 after 435 days.

Remember that gentle national vendor discount of around three per cent? Here in Inverloch, overpriced homes have handed back thirty and forty per cent. When I added up the quantifiable damage across the community, properties that were overpriced, sat too long, and eventually sold for far less than they should have, the figure came to more than $3.27 million in seller losses.

That is not a forecast. That is money that has already left local families and is not coming back.

Every one of those owners, at some point, sat in a listing presentation and chose a number. I would put my reputation on the fact that very few of them chose the lowest one.

The part that should genuinely make you angry: this is legal

Now I want to explain something most sellers never realise, and it is the reason I believe this practice perhaps should be illegal.

Victoria has spent the last decade building serious machinery to stop agents quoting prices that are too low. Underquoting, where an agent advertises a property to buyers below its likely selling price, is illegal under the Estate Agents Act 1980. Consumer Affairs Victoria runs a dedicated Underquoting Taskforce. It has issued more than two hundred infringements totalling around $2.3 million in fines.

And from 2026, Victoria is introducing nation-first laws forcing agents to publish the vendor's reserve before auction. Individual penalties can run past $40,000 under the estate agent laws, and far higher under Australian Consumer Law.

Read that again and notice who every cent of that protection is for. It is all built to protect the buyer from being told a number that is too low.

There is no equivalent taskforce, no infringement regime, and no dedicated law aimed at protecting you, the seller, from being told a number that is too high in order to win your listing. Inflating an appraisal to a vendor is not, in itself, a named offence. In theory it could be challenged as misleading conduct, because the Act does require an agent's estimate to be reasonable.

In practice it is almost never pursued, for exactly the reason that veteran agent gave Four Corners. The inflated number is an opinion. It is delivered verbally, across your kitchen table, with no paper trail. And when it all goes wrong, the agent simply shrugs and says the market shifted.

So the same dishonesty, pointed in two directions, carries wildly different consequences. Quote a buyer too low and the state may fine you tens of thousands of dollars.

Quote a seller too high, cost a family hundreds of thousands and two years of their life, and there is, realistically, no one coming. That is the gap you fell into. You were never warned about it, because the person who benefits from the gap is the person you were trusting for advice.

The best price is work, not a promise

Here is the detail that turns this from unfortunate into almost insulting, and it is a large part of why I was willing to walk. In each of the five May listings I stepped back from, the winning agent did not only promise more money. They promised it while spending less to achieve it.

Sit with the logic of that for a moment. The highest, hardest, most ambitious price in the market is the one that needs the most buyers in front of it, the most professional photography and video, the widest distribution, the most genuine competition.

It is the price that needs everything firing. Instead it is routinely paired with the thinnest campaign, because a thin campaign is the other lever the agent pulled to win you. You have been promised the hardest possible result and handed the weakest possible tools to reach it. No serious plan survives that contradiction.

What getting you the best market price actually takes

I let those five listings go because I am not willing to win a home with a number and then under-resource the one thing that genuinely lifts a price: the work. The best the market will truly pay is not a promise made at the kitchen table. It is a sequence of deliberate steps, repeated on every campaign, every time.

It begins with an accurate price built from real evidence, recent comparable sales drawn from CoreLogic and Pricefinder rather than a figure chosen to flatter you. A correctly positioned home sells while it is fresh and into competition, which is precisely when the strongest prices are paid.

Then comes presentation that makes buyers want it. Every campaign I run goes through 3996Studio, my in-house production, so the photography, video and drone work is genuinely professional rather than a phone snapshot uploaded to a portal. Then comes real distribution, because a listing does not sell by sitting on the portals waiting to be found.

It sells when it is placed in front of thousands of the right buyers, including the ones who were not actively looking, through a dedicated Bass Coast audience built over a decade and targeted social campaigns where buyers actually spend their time.

Then comes genuine competition at the negotiation table, which is why I use Openn, where every qualified buyer can see and respond to the others in real time rather than guessing in the dark. And underneath all of it is attention. I cap my active listings at around twenty on purpose, so every owner receives principal-level oversight from the first appraisal through to settlement.

None of that fits on a listing presentation as neatly as a big number does. But it is the entire difference between the price you are promised and the price you actually get, and rather than ask you to take my word for it, you can see exactly what that work produces across the Bass Coast campaigns I have documented. The high quote is what an agent offers instead of the work. The work is what I offered those five owners in place of a number I could not stand behind.

If you have already signed, it is not too late

If you are reading this with a sinking feeling because you recognise your own situation, take a breath, because the most important thing I can tell you is that you are not trapped.

A home at Beacon Court had sat for 172 days with another agency and not a single offer. The owners switched. Twenty-seven days later it had drawn 121 enquiries and seven formal offers, and sold at $860,000. That turnaround sits alongside other documented Inverloch and Bass Coast results that followed the same approach.

Switching agents mid-campaign is not only possible, it is often the only thing left that actually changes the outcome. Most listing agreements contain a defined termination or review window, and a short written notice is usually all it takes. I am happy to walk you through the exact wording.

Before you sign anything with any Inverloch real estate agent, including me, ask these questions and watch how they answer:

• Show me three comparable sales from the last ninety days that justify this price. Not similar listings. Actual sales.

• What is your written plan, and your timeline, if we have no offers in the first four to six weeks?

• Across your last twelve months of listings, how many needed a price reduction of more than twenty per cent?

• What is your average days on market against the Inverloch suburb benchmark?

• Walk me through, in real dollars, what overpricing my home will cost me in carrying costs and final price.

An agent who cannot answer these, or who gets defensive when you ask, has just told you everything you need to know.

The choice is still yours

Selling your home is the largest financial transaction most people ever make. You deserve to walk into it with clear eyes and real numbers, not a fantasy figure designed to get a signature on a form.

The hard truth, written plainly, is this. The agent who quotes the highest price is rarely the agent who delivers the best result. They are usually the agent who was most strategic about winning your business and least accountable for what happens afterward.

The agent willing to tell you an honest number, backed by evidence, before you list, is the one prepared to do the work that protects the very money the high quote is quietly putting at risk. The best market price was never going to come from the promise. It only ever comes from the work that follows it.



You still get to choose which path you are on. But choose it now, while your listing is fresh and the choice still costs you nothing, rather than in twelve months, when the choice has already cost you everything the high quote promised and more.

If you want an honest conversation about what your Inverloch property will genuinely sell for, with the comparable sales in front of you and nothing dressed up to win your signature, I am here for it.

You can see the results that approach delivers across my Bass Coast case studies. A difficult conversation today is far cheaper than a difficult year on the market.

Leo Edwards is an Inverloch real estate agent and the principal of Inverloch 3996 @realty, and the two-time RateMyAgent Agent of the Year for Inverloch. A Certified Price Expert and active local property investor, he sells across Inverloch, Cape Paterson, Wonthaggi, and the wider Bass Coast area with a digital-first, evidence-led approach and no shopfront, holding a 91.9 per cent list-to-sale price accuracy across his 2024 to 2025 listings.

Talk pricing honestly at inverlochatrealty.com.au

or call him directly on 0472 523 445.