The commission objection, and how to hold your fee

What do you say when a vendor says your commission is too high?

You answer with arithmetic before you answer with argument. Put what they are asking for into dollars, put the price outcome beside it, and let the two numbers sit together on the table.

Three numbers decide this conversation and the fee is the smallest of them. The first is the fee itself: on the national median dwelling value of A$928,421 in Cotality's July 2026 Home Value Index, a 2.65 per cent commission is about A$24,603 of gross commission to the agency. The second is what the vendor is actually asking for, which is usually a quarter or half of a percentage point, or A$2,321 to A$4,642 of that same value. The third is the price outcome, and Cotality put the median vendor discount across the combined capitals at 3.6 per cent in its July 2026 chart pack, about A$33,423 on the same value.

Three cautions before you take that table into a room. The lower two rates are illustrative, chosen because they are the cuts vendors ask for, not because anybody published them. The A$928,421 is a valuation index median across all dwellings, not a median of sales, so read it as the scale of a typical property. And the 3.6 per cent discount is measured against the vendor's own asking price, so the last row shows the size of a lever rather than a forecast.

How much money is the fee argument actually about?

Between about two and five thousand dollars on a median priced property, and the vendor almost never knows that. As a percentage, 2.15 against 2.65 sounds like a fifth of the fee gone. In dollars on the national median dwelling value it is A$4,642, which is roughly one seventh of what the market took off the median vendor between asking price and contract.

The spread is 1.02 percentage points, from Tasmania at 3.25 per cent to the Australian Capital Territory at 2.23 per cent, with the Northern Territory at 3.00, South Australia at 2.90, Queensland at 2.80, Western Australia at 2.75, and New South Wales and Victoria level at 2.35 (bRight Agent, 2026). The national median is 2.65 per cent.

That survey is the most transparent commission figure available in this country and it is still a commercial industry survey. bRight Agent publishes no methodology, the reading is a median rather than an average, and regional postcodes sit above capital city ones. Quote it with its date and its publisher, never as official data.

Why does the vendor already have a number?

Because they read three pages before they rang you, and every one of them was published by a business that earns when a vendor compares agencies. Comparison and lead generation platforms publish state by state commission averages, and on our reading in August 2026 the two most visible of them showed neither a publication date nor a sample size on the page.

The framing matters more than the figures. Most of them are written to tell a vendor that a first quote is negotiable and that they should interview several agencies, which is fair advice and an argument you walk into blind if you have never read one. Read two of them before your next listing presentation.

The script: the fee question at the listing presentation

The vendor's sentence is almost always the same and it almost always arrives last, after the price and the method of sale have been agreed. Here is what holding a fee sounds like when it is arithmetic rather than defence.

Four moves are doing the work in that script, and the third is the one most agents skip. The first gives the number before the argument, so the vendor is not left guessing it: A$4,178 is 0.45 of a percentage point on the national median dwelling value of A$928,421 (Cotality, July 2026). The rival rate of 2.2 per cent is illustrative, as is the sale price.

The second puts a larger published number beside the small one rather than against it. A$33,423 is the same 3.6 per cent median vendor discount Cotality reported for the combined capitals in its July 2026 chart pack, applied to the same dwelling value, and it is modelled arithmetic rather than a measured outcome for any single property.

The third refuses the obvious argument. There is no published Australian study linking the fee an agency charges to the price it achieves, so the script says so out loud instead of implying it. Telling a vendor that a cheaper agency sells for less is an invented result, and a vendor who goes looking will find nothing behind it.

The fourth converts a fee argument into something testable. Dated commitments in the agency agreement give the vendor a way to judge the fee after the fact, which is the only honest answer to a question about value that has not happened yet.

What do you say when they have it in writing from another agency?

You ask to read the whole thing before you answer any part of it. A rate is not a fee. What leaves the vendor's proceeds also includes the advertising, whether that is charged upfront or deducted at settlement, and whatever the agreement says happens above the estimate.

That answer loses you a listing occasionally. It also ends the version of this conversation where a fee is cut in the room at seven in the evening and resented for the next ninety days.

What does the commission cover before it reaches anybody?

Less than the vendor imagines. The A$24,603 in the table is gross commission payable to the agency on the sale, and the published sources for the commission rate and for the dwelling value say nothing at all about what comes out of it next.

• The salesperson's split, which is agreed between the agency and the agent and which no published Australian dataset covers.
• GST treatment, which neither commission source specifies.
• Marketing, where vendor paid advertising is usually a separate budget rather than a slice of the fee.
• Conjunctional arrangements, where a second agency introduced the buyer and shares the commission.

Say that plainly rather than defensively. A vendor who believes the whole 2.65 per cent lands in one person's pocket is negotiating against a number that does not exist, and correcting it is a fact rather than an argument.

Where can an agency actually lose its commission?

In the paperwork and in the advertising, not in the negotiation. Two published New South Wales rules do more damage to a fee than any vendor has ever done, and both of them are decided before a property goes to market.

Those are the figures NSW Fair Trading publishes today. Larger penalties have been legislated and reported, and this desk could not open a government page to confirm their commencement on this run, so the current published figures are the ones printed here. The conversation that keeps an agency away from that line is in how to tell a vendor their price is too high.

What if you decide to move on fee?

Then move once, move for something, and write down what you got for it. A cut handed over in the room to end an awkward silence teaches the vendor that the number was soft, and every later request lands on the same soft number.

Keep the arithmetic of the whole pipeline in view while you decide. Ray White's managing director reported that its 2025 phone days produced 36,000 appraisals and 2,337 listings, a conversion of 6.5 per cent, which is one listing for roughly every fifteen appraisals (Elite Agent, February 2026). Scarce presentations are a reason to prepare this conversation, not a reason to buy the listing.

ListingLine is an AI voice agent that calls an Australian real estate agent's farm area in the agent's name, at A$2.00 per connected call. It books appraisals and stops there. The fee conversation happens weeks later in a room no calling product is in, and a supplier who implies otherwise is describing something their software cannot do.

If the constraint at your end is how many listing presentations you get rather than what happens inside them, the dial arithmetic is in how many calls it takes to win one listing, and what happens between the appraisal and the authority is in the appraisal to listing conversion rate.