Your agent works for you. Their commission works for the buyer.

“Could this book save me $40,000?”

Honestly, I have no idea. I don't know your house, your market, or your agent.

So here's the arithmetic instead. You do the sum. These are the things that routinely go wrong on an $800,000 Australian sale. And every one of them is a chapter in the book.

That's the whole pitch. Forty-nine dollars, against the largest transaction most people ever make. If it changes one decision it has paid for itself several hundred times over. And if it doesn't, you get your money back.

One thing before you buy: this is a playbook, not a valuation. It won't tell you what your house is worth. It tells you what to ask, what to refuse, and where the money leaks. Buy it if you want a process. Don't if you want reassurance.

You'll sell a house twice in your life. They do it every week.

The agent across your kitchen table has run this exact conversation hundreds of times. They know what you're going to say before you say it, because the last forty sellers said the same thing. They know which of your objections are real and which ones are nerves.

They know exactly how long to leave a silence before you fill it with a lower number.

That's not a conspiracy, it's just experience. But experience on one side of a negotiation and none on the other is how thirty thousand dollars quietly changes hands.

And you never find out, because nobody sends you an invoice for the money you didn't get. Every other mistake in your life announces itself. This one doesn't. You'll go to settlement pleased, and never learn what the number could have been.

I was on the other side of that table

I sold residential real estate at a small agency in Brisbane. I sat in those kitchens. I know what gets said in the car on the drive back to the office, and what gets said to a buyer when the seller isn't in the room.

I'll be straight about why I left, because it should change how you read this. I didn't leave in protest. I left because the job is brutal. Long hours, constant rejection, and people who treat you with contempt before you've finished a sentence. I wasn't cut out for it. I got out at twenty-one.

So I'm not here with an axe to grind. I don't think agents are crooks. Most of the people I worked alongside were decent, and the job is harder than it looks from your side of the table.

Almost nothing that costs sellers money is villainy. It's structure.

Nothing in a standard commission arrangement rewards anyone for fighting hard on your behalf. And in all my time in the industry, I never once met a seller who'd been told that before they signed.

So I wrote it down, at twenty-one, in the months after I left, while I could still hear the conversations word for word. Then it sat in a folder for ten years. When I finally went back through it, almost nothing needed changing.

These aren't market conditions, which move constantly. They're incentives, and incentives sit still.

Andrew Roache

Three books, two tools

Written for the Australian market: strata, stamp duty, auctions, vendor-paid advertising, agency agreements.

The Agent Interview Scorecard

Print one per agent. Seven questions, two pressure tests, scoring, and a side-by-side comparison. Fill it in while they're talking it visibly changes the answers you get, because it signals you intend to hold them to it.

Take the scorecard free →  No email required. It's the part you need before you sign anything, so it isn't behind the paywall.

The Renovation ROI Calculator

A spreadsheet that applies the 1.5× rule automatically. Enter what a job costs and what your agent says it adds; it tells you do it or don't, and works out what you'd actually clear once your time and holding costs are counted.

What that adds up to

Look inside

Not mockups. These are four pages lifted straight out of the files you get, one from each.

Top left to bottom right: the commission maths from Chapter 7, the open-home chapter from The Buyer's Edge, the excess worked example from Knowing Your Insurance, and the scorecard you print and fill in.

Australia has eight sets of rules. Most advice ignores all of them.

Cooling-off is the clearest example. Every state handles it differently, two don't have it at all, and buyers routinely find that out on the day they sign.

Cooling-off, private sale

And one rule that holds everywhere: there is no cooling-off period at any auction in Australia. Several states close the back door too. In NSW you lose it if you exchange on auction day after the property passes in, in Queensland if you're a registered bidder inside two business days, in Victoria for three clear business days either side.

This is the level the books are written at. Strata, stamp duty, auctions, vendor-paid advertising, agency agreements. And the state you're actually standing in.

Current as at August 2026 and checked against each state's own regulator. Rules move; check yours before you act on any of it.

Everything you get

The other way to learn this

You learn it by selling. Australians do that two or three times in a lifetime, about a decade apart. And the tuition gets paid in commission, and in the price you didn't get.

By the time the lesson lands the transaction is over, and there's no second run at it. Ninety minutes, or three houses across thirty years. That's the actual comparison.

Instant PDF. No app, no login, nothing to subscribe to, nothing that expires. You'll get the download link on the confirmation screen and in your email.

What that actually is

$49 is two Uber Eats orders.

One of them is a pad thai you'll have forgotten by Thursday. The other one sits in your pocket while somebody talks you down from $800,000.

So you're not really deciding whether to spend $49. You're deciding whether to walk into the largest negotiation of your life having read the other side's playbook, or not.

You only get one clean run at the first thirty days on the market. There's no version of this where you get to go back and do it again knowing what you know afterwards.

Questions people actually ask