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.

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.

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.

Everything you get

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