Before the Weekend

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.

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EP. 16

Before the Weekend

A Developer's Collapse, the Rate Flip and Four Different Brisbanes

28 Aug 2026 · 1h 20m

This week on [Before the Weekend](https://beforetheweekend.com/), [Kasey McDonald](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasey-mcdonald-tutaki-857a3337/) and [Peter Schravemade](https://www.linkedin.com/in/schravemade/) work through a numbers week in which almost none of the numbers agreed with each other. First, Universal Property Group. Administrators were appointed Tuesday to a business carrying roughly $3.2 billion in liabilities, $2.85 billion of it borrowing, spread across hundreds of numbered subsidiaries running as high as UPG 460. They want $20 million just to keep it trading for five weeks. The number that matters to anyone holding a contract is the $27 million of buyer money sitting outside protected accounts, alongside $209 million of completed stock nobody has been able to shift, in the middle of a supply crisis. Then Perth, where REIWA disqualified an agent from its own awards because the figures he submitted did not stack up. That would have been the story on its own. The second matter is heavier: the same agent is alleged to have bought his own vendor's home through a company registered the same day the offer was made, at the agency's own address, with the disclosure form arriving almost six weeks after the contract was signed. There was a ghost open home and there were retrospective valuations. Peter is careful throughout that all of it is alleged. Then the flip. Three of the big four now forecast a rate hike where the consensus was a cut in 2027, with Westpac the last one holding. Peter puts the ACTU's two-year lease mandate against the arithmetic a property manager actually faces, $5 a week incremental against an $80 step-up, and argues the mandate would produce exactly the behaviour it was written to prevent. Then the story nobody else ran. Four providers published vacancy rates for the same cities in the same quarter and none of them match. Sydney: Domain 1.1 per cent, SQM 1.7, PropTrack 1.7, Cotality 1.9. Brisbane: Domain 0.6 against Cotality 1.2. Darwin 0.1 against 0.9, a ninefold gap. Cotality calls Sydney and Brisbane the loosest capitals while Domain and SQM have Brisbane among the tightest. As Peter puts it: "Brisbane, no one seems to know where the hell the vacancy rate is." Also this week: national house rents at $730 a week and 69 per cent of weekly pay in Sydney, a Highland Property rent roll doubled to 5,000 by running property management as its own business unit with its own P&L, New Zealand naming and shaming its worst property managers, Ingenia's $992.5 million move on Peet, and a study finding 81 per cent of Australian homes sit below the World Health Organization's 18 degree safe minimum across winter.

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EP. 15

Before the Weekend

Operation Claw, the Thirty Per Cent and a Trip to Bali

21 Aug 2026 · 1h 33m

This week on Before the Weekend, Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade work through the week the buyer's agent industry stopped being a story about one bad operator. First, AUSTRAC. Operation Claw pooled data from ten major Australian banks and found potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in suspected fraudulent home loans - inflated incomes, misrepresented employment, offshore and third-party funds at settlement, most of it linked to Sydney property. Peter has been one of the loudest critics of how many AML checkpoints Tranche 2 forces on a single transaction, and says this is the answer to the question he put to AUSTRAC's CEO on stage last year. He's still not happy about how it was implemented. Then the number every property manager will be asked about for the next twelve months. Ray White modelling puts the break-even gross yield for a leveraged investor at 5.15 per cent. Capital city yields are sitting at 3.95. Something has to close that gap, and rents can't. Peter puts his own money where his mouth is and explains why he just locked his tenants onto two-year leases - and why he thinks making that compulsory, as the ACTU proposed on Tuesday, would be the fastest way to make the problem worse. Josh Deckart of Zapiio joins to give the state of the buyer's agent market from the inside: the SMSF wave that ran to the deadline and then stopped dead, why he could name fifty small operators who have already left, and the argument nobody else is making - that the budget put jet fuel on the commercial market, where leases are CPI-linked and every increase gets passed to a small business tenant. Two hours after that interview was recorded, Atlas Property Group announced it was entering voluntary liquidation. Then the interview that changes the mood. Peter Diamantidis of Ray White United Group has spent three years building a recognition program that rewards property managers exactly like sales stars - overseas trips, partners included, gated on hard metrics his teams don't get to negotiate. He set a target of 500 new organic managements. They brought in eleven hundred. Three property managers have left in three years. His answer to principals who think it's too expensive: "Just pay two recruiter fees, there's your trip." Also this week: Real acquires REMAX, McGrath partners with 172-year-old Hodges, the REIV takes on the Victorian government over auction reserve disclosure, and the last regional markets standing.

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