Alaya charges a fixed engagement fee, quoted in writing before you sign, that doesn't move when the purchase price moves. Below is what that fee covers, why we don't charge a percentage, how the tax treatment works for investors, and the situations where hiring a buyers agent - us or anyone else - genuinely isn't worth it.
We don't publish a rate card, and honestly, that's deliberate - the fee depends on what we're actually doing for you. A single purchase with a tight brief is a different job to a multi-property acquisition plan. What we can tell you before you ever speak to us: the fee is agreed up front, in writing, before we start. It never changes based on what you pay for the property - we have no incentive for you to pay more. And you'll have the exact number by the end of the consultation call, so there's no mystery for long.
Most Australian buyers agents charge a percentage of the purchase price - typically somewhere between 1.5 and 3 per cent. On the surface it sounds tidy: pay in proportion to the size of the deal. In practice, it creates a straight conflict of interest. A percentage fee rewards the agent for every dollar you pay above what you needed to - the higher the purchase price, the bigger the agent's cheque. On a purchase that lands even a hundred thousand higher than it needed to, a two per cent agent quietly earns more for negotiating a worse outcome for you. It's a small number relative to the deal, but the incentive is pointed in the wrong direction every time you sit down to negotiate.
A fixed fee removes that entirely. The number is quoted before we start, it doesn't move based on how the negotiation lands, and our incentive is aligned with yours: the lower the price we secure, the better we look, without a single dollar of it changing our fee. It also makes the fee sensible to compare - you know upfront what the engagement will cost you, rather than waiting to see what percentage of the final price it works out to. Some percentage-model agents will argue their model gives them more skin in the game. It doesn't. It just gives them a bigger cheque when you pay more.
The engagement covers the full end-to-end process: a strategy session that translates your goals, timeframe and borrowing capacity into a market shortlist; the top-down research that narrows a 400-plus council area landscape down to a defensible target market this quarter; the on-the-ground search across both listed and off-market stock; the due diligence pack on the specific asset (contract review coordination with your solicitor, building and pest, strata reports where relevant, comparable sales analysis); the negotiation itself, including auction bidding where the property is going to auction; and settlement support through to keys.
You also get the tools and data we buy with: the market cycle read for your target area, the suburb and asset scorecards, the after-tax cashflow model on the specific property with the correct 2027 tax treatment applied, and the written thesis explaining why we're recommending this specific asset over the alternatives we looked at. The written thesis matters - it's the artefact that shows the decision was reasoned, not intuition, and it's what you'll want in three years when you're deciding whether to hold, refinance or sell down for the next purchase.
For an investment property, the buyers agent fee is not immediately deductible in the year you pay it - the ATO treats it as a capital cost of acquiring the asset. That means it's added to the property's cost base for capital gains tax purposes, and it reduces the taxable capital gain when you eventually sell. In practical terms, the fee comes off your taxable gain at sale rather than your income at purchase - so the tax benefit lands years later, at your marginal rate, with the 50 per cent CGT discount applied under current rules. Under the 2027 indexation regime the maths shifts slightly but the same principle applies.
For an owner-occupier purchase - a home you'll live in - the fee is not deductible in any form and doesn't add to a cost base you can use (owner- occupier main-residence sales are usually CGT-exempt anyway). This is general information based on current ATO treatment, not tax advice for your specific circumstances - confirm the treatment with your accountant before relying on it.
A buyers agent isn't the right call for every buyer, and we tell people so on the discovery call. If you're buying an owner-occupier home in your own suburb, in a market you already understand, on a budget where the fee is a material share of the deposit, the maths often doesn't stack up - the value a buyers agent adds is thinnest in your own backyard, and you already know what you're looking at. If you're buying at a price point where the fee is a big percentage of the purchase price (in the low hundreds of thousands, in a regional market you know well), the same applies.
If you enjoy the search itself - visiting opens on weekends, running your own comparable sales, negotiating directly - and you have the time to do it properly, the argument for hiring anyone is weaker. Our fee is worth paying when the market is one you can't cover from where you live, when you're investing rather than home-buying, when the data required is beyond what you'll practically source yourself, and when the cost of getting the wrong market or the wrong asset is multiples of the fee. When it isn't, we say so and end the call there.
Curious whether the maths stacks up for you? Run the numbers first with the property cashflow calculator, or read the 4-step process before you book a discovery call.