Billboards, Trust Accounts and 588 Empty Homes

EP. 14 · 14 Aug 2026 · 1h 22m

This week on Before the Weekend, Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade work through a week where the running theme was what people chose not to say.

Two agents started from the identical insight - the public doesn't much like real estate agents. One put a self-deprecating joke about himself on a billboard in Wynnum and said up front he wrote the review himself. The other invented a theft, accused a woman who doesn't exist, and didn't tell anyone until the last slide. Half a million views later, Peter asks the question nobody else is asking: did it sell the house?

Then NSW publishes the results of a statewide, intelligence-led trust account operation - more than $200,000 in fines, 34 businesses on notice, and 41 overdue audits that only arrived once licences were threatened. The Supreme Court hands down its deposit flicking judgment, which says considerably more than the media statement announcing it.

Also this week: a Victorian buyer left with a $32,000 termite bill, and a Facebook post the vendor wrote before she signed the Section 32. The RBA holds at 4.35 per cent while ANZ forecasts Sydney down 9.9 per cent across 2026. The Sydney Plan commences with one genuinely new idea buried inside it. A Canberra agent who slept rough as a teenager is trying to renovate twenty vacant public housing homes and have families in them by Christmas, while 588 sit empty and 3,650 people wait. And Peter reads REA's new AI Search Trends report properly, and finds the story is what isn't in it.