FAQ

How long does the service last?

Secret Agent specifies six months as a standard engagement period. But property does not operate on neat timelines. Some clients purchase within months, or even weeks. For others it can take considerably longer. The right property, at a fair price, in a market that is cooperating — these things align on their own schedule, not ours.

We are not a transaction firm. We do not measure success by how quickly a deal is closed. A fast purchase on the wrong property is a poor result; a slow search that lands on the right one is a good one. The natural course is for the engagement to continue until we can land on the right solution.

How does the service operate once commenced?

Communication changes over the course of your time with Secret Agent. During negotiations and the concluding stages of due diligence, it tends to be frequent and detailed. When the market is quiet or nothing of interest is presenting itself, it slows down. This is normal — property searching has a rhythm to it, and not every week produces something worth reporting.

Secret Agent is not formulaic. Some clients prefer only the critical information. Others want more frequent contact, even when things are quiet. We adapt to you, not the other way around.

Does Secret Agent specialise in any one thing?

Secret Agent specialises in the acquisition of good quality properties that offer value. We do not focus on a single geographical patch or property style. Quality offerings are almost always highly limited — certain suburbs may contain only a handful of genuine acquisition candidates in their total housing stock, the best of which may never come to market. A narrow focus would mean long periods with nothing to show for it.

What connects our work across different locations and property types is the standards applied. Position, structure, the right opportunity, and financial value all need to align. Many clients take a flexible approach across locations to find that alignment. A house with a certain quality in one suburb may be more closely related to another house across town than to anything in the surrounding area. The search follows the quality, not the postcode.

There is also the matter of identifying properties that may not be in demand at a given moment, rather than herding toward those the influencers and trendsetters are currently favouring.

How many clients does Secret Agent take on?

We try to operate a little below capacity rather than above it. When a firm takes on too many clients, the quality of attention given to each one diminishes.

We do not have a fixed number, but we are deliberate about not overextending. This means there are times when we may ask a new client to wait, or suggest that the timing is not right to begin. We would rather turn work away than do it poorly.

Off-market sales — do you get access to them?

An off-market sale is generally considered to be a property not listed for sale publicly, providing the buyer with a unique opportunity and lessened competition. The term itself is something of a contradiction: the property being discussed is in fact on the market, just not publicly.

There can be a perception that an extensive pool of off-market properties exists, if only one knew how to reach them. As a rule, non-publicly advertised properties are most numerous at the top end of the various sub-markets, where discretion is valued and the pool of buyers is small and known. As a property’s market value moves closer to the entry point for its category, most owners will gravitate toward a public sale campaign.

The best results are achieved by looking at all properties collectively, regardless of how they are brought to market. Often those properties put to market publicly offer the better opportunities, as their owners have made a significant financial commitment to the sale process. A high strike-rate of off-market purchases can itself be a warning sign. Many owners need a public campaign for their price expectations to be brought down to reality. Buying without that process can mean paying more, not less.

Secret Agent maintains an extensive contact network and seeks to provide clients with as much opportunity as possible, whether properties are sold through public or non-public channels.

How much will you save me?

Around 2010, Secret Agent was one of the first acquisition firms to publish a set of statistics detailing the average savings rate for clients. The figure was generally derived from the difference between the price a client was prepared to pay and the eventual price at the conclusion of the purchase.

The last time we measured the savings rate for clients, it ran at 8.1 per cent. It was an impressive figure. However, the indicator was not a good reflection of the work we were doing. The adage that when something becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure comes to mind. When we look back and reflect, some of the finest acquisitions we made were on properties acquired at budget — and some were purchased over budget.

The very best properties attract significant interest and are never acquired cheaply. Conversely, those negotiated down most heavily may be the ones that, in hindsight, were not worth the resources to acquire.

The measurement itself is riddled with subjective factors and can be shaped to fit a narrative.

The answer to ‘How much will you save me?’ is not possible to know in advance. There will be times when we can save you significant money in a negotiation, and times when we cannot. More important is what the question really points to. Savings need to be thought of in broader terms — purchasing the right property to begin with, being guided away from problematic ones, and having a professional with the right skills so that opportunities do not slip away when found.

The properties I want are always a little more than my budget — can you help?

Secret Agent is skilled at obtaining value, but there are limits to what can be achieved when resources fall short. While certain properties can feel almost within reach, they may remain outside the possibility of attainment. Each round of transactions can create new price precedents which, when the market is rising, move properties further from reach.

The uncomfortable truth is that those who are well resourced tend to secure suitable property comfortably within their means, while those falling short, even by what feels like a small margin, may need to stretch beyond theirs.

Secret Agent can help well-resourced clients obtain what they want and provide value. For those falling short, we can help with a rethink — new ideas on direction, location, and what might be possible within different parameters. We cannot find property that is both cheap and excellent.

The one exception is a downturn. If the market you are looking at is in a period of reduced demand, we can help you use that to your advantage. Over the coming decade, we expect more locations and property types to experience such down periods, given the preceding decades of sustained growth.

Do you help first home buyers?

Most of Secret Agent’s clients have purchased property before. However, we do help some first home buyers, typically those with the financial means to acquire above the entry-point price ranges for their area of interest.

The Australian property market has historically been difficult for much of the first home buying community. The price ranges stimulated by government deposit schemes have generally made acquiring property of real substance challenging, and the competition to enter the market has created persistent frustration for buyers.

That said, conditions in parts of the market are shifting. If you are a first home buyer with the means to get above the entry-point frustration zone, this may be a more favourable period than the past decade offered.

If you are a first home buyer and do not know where to turn, we can offer something simple. Write to us at info@secretagent.com.au and we will provide a response to your situation within two business days, usually sooner. It will not be formal advice — just a candid opinion if you are caught in a bind of some sort and require a quick opinion.

What are your fees?

Secret Agent operates on a fixed-fee basis. We provide a schedule on request, tailored to the brief and the expected acquisition. The full fee is only payable should a successful acquisition take place; otherwise the fee is a partial one.

The value of professional help on a property acquisition is best understood in terms of what it changes — the property found, the price negotiated, the problems identified before contracts are signed, and the wrong properties avoided along the way. If the outcome is materially better for having engaged us, the fee is not a cost. It is part of the investment.

Property transactions carry significant associated costs beyond any advisory fee. As a general guide, purchasers should expect that a sum approaching 10 per cent of the acquisition total will be needed to cover stamp duty, other statutory duties and levies, legal fees, and the costs of due diligence and specialist consultants. Foreign purchasers will need to budget for more than 10 per cent due to additional stamp duty considerations. Commercial property purchasers should consider the GST implications and any other tax obligations, such as CIPT.

Can I use my own lawyer, building adviser, financier, or financial adviser?

Yes. Many of our clients come with professionals they already know and trust, their lawyer, their accountant, their building adviser. We work alongside them. If you do not have an existing team, we can recommend specialists we have worked with over the years. The choice is yours.

Property acquisitions involve several professionals working in concert, often under time pressure. Part of our role is to coordinate that process so that nothing falls between the gaps and the due diligence is thorough. If you have a team you trust, we are happy to work with them. If not, we have spent close to two decades learning who the good people are.

What is Secret Agent’s position on A.I.?

Secret Agent holds a considered and nuanced view of artificial intelligence. We take seriously the concerns raised by Emily Bender, a University of Washington professor specialising in computational linguistics, and reported by the science writer James Gleick in 2025. Bender and her co-authors described large language models as ‘stochastic parrots’ — systems that stitch together linguistic patterns from vast training data according to probability, without reference to meaning. Their argument went further, stating that we are predisposed to interpret machine-generated text as meaningful and intentional, and that this perception may itself be the illusion.

Secret Agent first examined the potential of artificial intelligence in a 2017 research report, which led us to believe that AI systems could prove useful for research tasks, particularly those requiring the processing of large datasets. That early interest has informed our approach since.

Over time we expect the technology to be transformative, and we have found it useful in certain areas of our work, particularly in extracting insights from large datasets in research tasks and in elements of the due diligence process where it can enhance rigour and reduce risk for clients.

What we commit to is this: the ideas, positions, and judgements you encounter from Secret Agent — whether in conversation, in reports, or on this site — are ours. When we write to you as our client, we write to you as a human being. The thinking is ours. Where we use AI as a tool in our work, we do so to support that thinking, not to replace it.

Our business is very much rooted in the nature of human affairs, and much of this is carried out in person and in private. It is beyond an AI system.

Where is Secret Agent’s social media presence?

Secret Agent has never been into social media. The firm had a Twitter account initially when the platform offered promise, but has not engaged with any platform since that time.

Our preference has always been to communicate through a regular newsletter and through direct correspondence with clients.

We understand the importance of such channels for reaching people, but we have long-held reservations about the fragmentary nature of building resources across multiple platforms, only for those platforms to become something different to what early adopters believed they stood for. There is something about social media which tends toward insincere communication and a sort of point-scoring mentality can take hold.

Secret Agent has held this view since 2008 and we expect to stay on this path. If that changes, we will say so. In the meantime, the best way to reach us is info@secretagent.com.au.

How do you keep my information private?

One of the first principles since founding the firm has been for clients to retain their privacy. Secret Agent does not like gossip.

Your information stays with us. We do not share it on social media, we do not feed it into artificial intelligence platforms, and we will not make any comment in relation to your situation to any media firm. Our conversations with clients are kept in the strictest confidence.

This extends to the acquisition process itself. We are discreet about who we are acting for, what we are looking at, and what a client’s circumstances are. There are moments when transparency with the other side is necessary to move things forward, but that is always a deliberate decision, never careless.