Why the price on the listing is almost never the price you'll pay
Think about the last ten things you bought. Groceries, a new phone, a car service, a flight to Brisbane. In every single one of those transactions, the advertised price was the price. You saw $4.50 for a flat white, you paid $4.50. The tag on a laptop said $1,799 — that's what the bank statement said the next morning.
Now think about buying a home.
You see a guide price of $1,200,000. You spend a weekend imagining your furniture in the living room, you pay for a building inspection, you arrange your finances. Then auction day arrives — and the property sells for $1,380,000. You were $180,000 short. And that's before stamp duty, conveyancing fees, and any number of other costs that don't appear anywhere on the listing — but will appear on your settlement statement. In most Australian states, stamp duty alone on a $1.38M purchase adds another $55,000 or more on top.
The point is this: the gap between what you see on a listing and what you actually pay to own that home is almost always larger than buyers expect, and it has more than one cause. The guide price is one part of the story. The costs that sit invisibly beside it are another. Understanding both is how you go into an auction with a realistic number rather than an optimistic one.
Property may be the only major purchase in most Australians' lives where the advertised price is routinely, significantly lower than what the property will actually sell for - and where substantial additional costs aren't included in the sticker price at all.
This gap between guide and outcome has a well-known name — under-quoting — and while it is regulated to varying degrees across Australian states, it remains one of the most persistent information asymmetries in residential property. Agents set a guide price and buyers are expected to understand that the final sale price could land materially higher. What buyers have rarely had access to is hard data on how much higher, and how consistently, for the specific agent marketing the property they want to buy. That's what we set out to measure.
