The honest answer: Yes. They’re negotiable. There’s no law in Western Australia that sets what an agent can charge — commissions here have been deregulated for years, and across the state they generally run somewhere between 2% and 3.5%.
So if you want the short answer: yes, you can negotiate.
But after more than two decades selling homes in the Perth Hills, I’ll tell you the truth most agents won’t. The commission rate is the wrong thing to be focused on. The question that actually matters — the only one that ends up in your bank account — is this:
What do I walk away with?
That’s it. That’s the whole game.
Is the cheapest commission actually the cheapest?
No. The cheapest commission is rarely the cheapest outcome. What lands in your pocket is the sale price minus the fees, not the fee on its own. A slightly higher fee that delivers a much higher sale price leaves you better off. Focus on what you walk away with, not the percentage.
Let me show you why the percentage is a trap.
Say Agent A quotes you a cheaper rate and Agent B costs you $10,000 more in fees. Most people stop right there and pick Agent A. Feels like a $10,000 win.
But if Agent B sells your home for $40,000 more than Agent A would have — and that happens more often than you’d think — then the “expensive” agent just put $30,000 more in your pocket. The cheap one cost you money.
$10,000 cheaper but $40,000 less in the sale price is not the cheapest option. It’s the most expensive mistake you can make.
I’m not a discount agent and I’ve never pretended to be. We charge 2.5% including GST, plus marketing. I’ll explain both. But I’d rather be the agent who gets you the highest number than the agent who shaved a few thousand off the fee and left tens of thousands on the table.
How much commission do you charge, and why is marketing separate?
We charge 2.5% including GST — in the normal WA range — plus marketing, paid separately by the seller at cost (around $2,600 on average). We keep the marketing separate on purpose: it removes a conflict of interest that would otherwise push an agent to sell fast rather than for your best price.
Two parts: the commission, and the marketing.
The commission is 2.5% including GST. That sits in the normal range for WA and, in my view, it’s what it costs to run a system that actually creates competition between buyers which is what drives your price up.
The marketing is paid separately, by you, up front. You can put it on a credit card, pay by EFT, or use one of the marketing finance companies that lets you settle it later. On average it works out to around $2,600 a property, and every cent of it is passed through at cost. There’s no markup on it. A REA (realestate.com.au) listing is around $1,500; professional photography and video is around $700; then there’s floor plans, the REIWA and Domain listings, and our in-house printed brochures.
Now — here’s the part most sellers never get told, and it’s the most important thing in this whole article.
We charge marketing separately on purpose. It removes a conflict of interest that
works against you.
Think it through. If the agency paid for all the marketing itself, and the agency is carrying ten properties at $2,600 each, that’s $26,000 a month tied up — and a lot more than that when the market slows and homes take longer to sell. When an agency is that far out of pocket, there is enormous pressure on the agent to get those properties sold fast — not for the best price, just sold — so the business can recover its money.
That pressure doesn’t land on the agency. It lands on you. It shows up as your agent quietly leaning on you to “just take the offer.”
When you pay the marketing yourself, that pressure disappears. The only thing left for me to chase is the best possible price for you, because that’s the only thing I get paid on. Our interests point in exactly the same direction. That’s the way it should be.
Real estate is brutal — and that’s exactly why your agent matters
Here’s something most people never think about. Real estate is almost unlike any other sales job, because you don’t start with a product to sell.
Sell cars, boats, furniture, anything — the product is already sitting there. Your job is just to find the buyer and present it to them. In real estate, you’ve got nothing to sell until you’ve won the listing in the first place. No listing, no income. Put plainly: if you don’t get the listing, you don’t eat.
That makes it one of the hardest businesses in the world to make a living in. The only way you survive long-term is by getting genuine results for your clients and building a reputation over years — and most people who start in this industry can’t do it. In my time I’ve watched the large majority of agents who come into the business come and go again inside a year or two.
So when you’re choosing who to trust with your biggest asset, what you’re really looking for is someone genuinely dedicated to the craft. And that is not about age or how long they’ve held a licence. A newer agent can be outstanding — as long as they’re training and getting sharper every single day. The rule I hold myself to is simple: be one per cent better than I was the day before, every day. The agent you want to avoid isn’t the young one — it’s the one who got their licence, learned the basics once, and stopped.
Are discount real estate agents worth it?
Usually not. An agent who slashes their own fee in seconds is showing you how they’ll cave when a buyer pushes back on your price — and most deep-discount agents survive on volume, not results. A weak negotiator who saves you a few thousand in fees can cost you tens of thousands on the sale price.
Here’s something to test any agent with. Ask them to drop their fee, and watch how fast they fold.
If an agent caves on their own commission in thirty seconds flat, ask yourself one thing: if they can’t hold their ground on their own fee, how hard do you think they’ll fight for yours? A negotiator who panics and discounts the moment they feel like they might lose the listing is showing you exactly how they’ll perform when a buyer pushes back on your price. They’ll fold there too.
The deep-discount agents tend to be the ones selling around ten homes a year. They’re often working on commission only, which means they’re frequently desperate for the next deal — and a desperate negotiator is a weak negotiator. I once overheard one say, out loud, “I’ll get it sold, I don’t care what the deal is, I discounted my commission to win it.” That’s not a strategy. That’s a fire sale, and your home is the fuel.
There’s a reason cut-price models keep failing here. A rate below what it costs to do the job properly can look fine while prices are climbing — anyone can look good in a rising tide. It’s the falling market that exposes the model. By the time you account for GST, company tax and the real cost of employing and training good people — wages and rent have both climbed sharply in recent years — the maths on a bargain-basement fee simply doesn’t hold up through a downturn. Around our corridor, the flat-fee and discount agencies that came through over the years have one thing in common: they’re gone.
The clearest example isn’t local. Purplebricks launched in Australia in 2016 promising to disrupt the industry with a cheap fixed fee. They spent a fortune on advertising and pulled out of the country in 2019 — less than three years later — after heavy losses (their final-year Australian operating loss was around A$34 million). One of the model’s fatal flaws: agents were paid an upfront fee whether the home sold well or not, so there was no real incentive tied to your result. They also picked up a fine from Queensland’s Office of Fair Trading for misleading claims about that fixed fee, and were widely criticised for pressuring sellers to drop their asking prices. Cheap to list. Expensive to sell. Sound familiar?
Proof, not promises
I don’t expect you to take any of this on faith. Here are three real sales.
Roleystone — $53,000 more, in 7 days. A home that had sat on the market for 90 days with a previous agent. Phone photos. A briefcase left sitting on the kitchen bench in the listing pictures. No video. Priced at $750,000 and going nowhere. We relisted it properly using a Select Date Sale, created real competition, and sold it in 7 days — four buyers through, two written offers — for $803,000. Same house. Same market. $53,000 difference.
Seville Grove — $81,000 above the offer the owner was ready to accept. The owner would have been happy anywhere in the $750,000–$800,000 range. Through the campaign we drew offers of $792,000, then $805,000, then $826,000. The owner was ready to sign at $826,000 — and most agents would have closed it right there and banked the commission. I held off for one more buyer who was waiting on his bank. Forty-eight hours later that buyer came in at $907,000. That’s $81,000 more than the seller was about to accept. The fee was irrelevant next to that number.
The $2.6 million sale that nearly fell over — and why it didn’t. During Covid I sold a home for $2.6 million in an area where the median was around $780,000. The buyer’s purchase depended on a chain — they had to sell their own $1.2 million property first, and their buyer was a self-employed truck driver waiting on a tax return to get finance across the line. Then the $2.6 million buyer hit family problems and tried to pull out entirely.
That deal didn’t collapse for one reason: the contract was watertight before any of it happened. I’d already had a finance variation pre-signed, and the conditions were written so the buyer would have forfeited a substantial deposit if they walked. I worked it through Christmas and New Year, kept the buyer calm, and got it to settlement — and my seller barely felt the stress, because that’s my job to absorb, not theirs.
Which brings me to the biggest myth in this business.
Does a fast house sale mean the agent did less work?
No — usually the opposite. In my experience, around 60% of the real work in a sale starts after the contract is signed, in the stretch between acceptance and settlement. That’s where dozens of small things can quietly go wrong and sink the deal. A fast sale doesn’t mean the job’s done — it means the hard part is just beginning.
If your home sells in a few days, plenty of people assume the agent got lucky and didn’t earn the commission. Handle that stretch between acceptance and settlement wrong, though, and the deal dies — and you’re back on the market with a “sold and fell over” stamp on your listing.
This is where experience earns its keep, and it’s the part most agents never properly train on.
Every sale in WA runs on the Joint Form of General Conditions for the Sale of Land — the standard contract published jointly by REIWA and the Law Society of Western Australia —together with the Offer and Acceptance. Inside that, it’s the special conditions and the actions attached to an offer that make or break a settlement. We spend serious time staying current on this, including recent court outcomes that change how things should be written, because the rules genuinely move. WA changed its plumbing regulations in February 2024, for instance — what counts as a “fixture,” and who’s even allowed to touch certain work, isn’t fixed in stone.
The skill is in how the conditions are written. A couple of examples from our own contracts:
- Garden reticulation. We specifically exclude it. Here’s why: come the final inspection, I’d turn the reticulation on and one sprinkler head wouldn’t fire — a $3 part — and that tiny thing could hold up an entire settlement. So we take it off the table in writing from the start.
- Alarm systems. Half the time people haven’t armed the alarm in years, can’t remember the code, or the backup battery is flat — a $50–$60 fix. The system might be perfectly fine, but nobody can prove it on the day. So we exclude it, plainly, in the contract.
None of that is about cutting corners. It’s the opposite. It’s spelling out exactly where everyone stands before anyone’s stressed, so there are no surprises and no arguments at final inspection. That’s what you’re actually paying a commission for — not the “for sale” sign, the settlement.
What questions should you ask before hiring an agent?
Before you sign with anyone, ask these five questions — the answers tell you far more about an agent than their fee does:
1. How many homes did you personally sell last year? Volume tells you whether they’re experienced or desperate.
2. What’s your average sale price compared to the asking price? Ask for the actual numbers.
3. What’s your strategy to create competition between buyers? “We’ll put it online” is not a strategy.
4. Is the marketing marked up, and who carries the cost? You want it passed through at cost, paid by you — for the conflict-of-interest reason above.
5. What happens between contract and settlement if something goes wrong? Listen for whether they actually understand the General Conditions, or just hand you a form.
My guarantee
When a seller comes to me with a cheaper quote from another agent, I don’t argue about the fee. I put it in writing: if I don’t achieve a price you’re genuinely happy with, I’ll do the job at the cheaper fee.
I can say that because I back myself. An agent who’s confident in the result doesn’t need to win you on price.
The bottom line
I’m a bit of a Formula One buff. There are twenty drivers on the grid and every one of them is good — you don’t get there otherwise. But only two or three are great, and those are the ones who keep winning the championship, year after year.
Real estate works exactly the same way. There are plenty of good and average agents. The thing to be sure of, before you sign anything, is that you’ve got a great one — because over the life of a sale, that’s the difference measured in tens of thousands of dollars, not a fraction of a percent on the fee.
Don’t shop for the cheapest car. Back the driver who wins.
If you’d like an honest appraisal and a straight conversation about what your home is really worth — and exactly what you’d walk away with — call the office or get in touch directly. No pressure, no padding.
