Before the Weekend ☀️

Before The Weekend
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Business
  • Updated Weekly

Before the Weekend is a weekly Australian real estate podcast hosted by Peter Schravemade and Kasey McDonald, bringing together industry leaders, property managers, regulators, technology founders and special guests from across the property sector. Each episode delivers practical, straight-talking discussion on the biggest stories shaping real estate across Australia, covering rental reforms, housing policy, compliance, property management, technology, consumer trust, investor sentiment and the future of the industry. Designed for agents, principals and property managers who want insight without the spin, Before the Weekend breaks down complex issues into real-world conversations that help the industry head into the weekend informed, prepared and thinking differently.

  1. 4 days ago

    Episode 15: Operation Claw, the Thirty Per Cent and a Trip to Bali | 21 August 2026

    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. Before the Weekend is a weekly podcast for Australian property professionals, hosted by Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade. New episodes every Friday.

  2. 13 Aug

    Episode 14: Billboards, Trust Accounts and 588 Empty Homes | 14 August 2026

    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. Before the Weekend is a weekly podcast for Australian property professionals, hosted by Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade. New episodes every Friday.

  3. 10 Aug ·  Bonus

    Quick Bite: Successful Until It Wasn't | Peter Hutton 11-08-26

    A special edition of Before the Weekend, recorded in Brisbane. Peter Schravemade sits down with Peter Hutton, who built Hutton & Hutton from his dining table into a three-office, thirty-person Brisbane agency turning over $200 million a year - and then watched around 70 per cent of its revenue walk out the door in eight weeks. The first resignation arrived in the first week of December, a month after the opening party for a new heritage-listed head office. A second office followed six weeks later. Recruiters stopped returning calls. By his own account he spent that year asleep under his desk most afternoons, and signed the liquidation paperwork on the sixth of January with something close to relief. Hutton has since taken the business apart structurally and found six things that went wrong. They became his book, Keep 100% Of What You Earn, and he is unusually direct about all of them: the termination clause he wrote himself, the red flags he chose not to act on, the lease he should not have signed, the third office he opened too early, and the ceiling he hit as a manager of people. The conversation also covers what the industry does to its own - the rumour that circulated in New Farm, the creditor who built a website asking if anyone knew where Peter Hutton was hiding, and the envelope of white powder that put his family on a footpath for six hours while a hazmat team worked. His argument, borrowed from a wartime statistician, is that the industry studies the wrong businesses. The aircraft that came home taught the analysts nothing. It was the ones that didn't that showed them where to put the armour. If any of this lands close to home, the Rise Initiative's Real Care app offers free confidential sessions with a psychologist. Details and all links in the show notes.

  4. 7 Aug

    Episode 13: Tenant Privacy, Portal Profits & The Block Is Back | 7 August 2026

    This week on Before the Weekend, Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade dig into the Victorian petition to ban "continuous video sweeps" during rental inspections - and why the technology being described isn't what's actually happening - plus the data privacy questions nobody in the coverage thought to ask. Kasey sits down with Kasey Lawrence of The Rental Network - consultant, trainer, and the industry's unofficial agony aunt - on the "listen up" text message that mortified the internet, Victoria's prescribed rental application form, bond portability's teething problems, and why the money hiding in the average rent roll would shock most principals. Also this week: Cotality confirms the downturn has spread to Brisbane and Adelaide as the RBA meets Tuesday; REA Group grows earnings 15% on flat listings - and what that means for agents' and vendors' marketing spend; one year of CoStar-owned Domain, graded against the boardroom revolt in the US; whether off-market (or as Pete insists, "off-portal") sales have gone too far; the $52,000 strata levy letter no owner wants to receive; Peter's interview of the week with Ellis Taylor of Real Time; and The Block returns - along with the annual question of whether it helps or harms how Australians think about renovation.

  5. 5 Aug ·  Bonus

    Quick Bite: The Talent Raid | Jacqui Barnes and Ellis Taylor 06-08-26

    A special edition of Before the Weekend, recorded in Sydney. Peter Schravemade is joined by Jacqui Barnes, Head of People and Growth at Laing+Simmons and author of the Women in Real Estate Insights Report, and Ellis Taylor, Director of Real Time Australia - the recruiter that Blackbird and AirTree name as their number one preferred talent supplier. Two months on from the report's launch, Jacqui returns with the person who is using her findings against the industry. Ellis is candid about it: the hardest stretch for a new agent is months six to eighteen, and that is precisely when he calls. "That's when I target them." Jacqui's response is that the industry has handed him the opportunity. Agencies spend seventy to eighty thousand dollars a year bringing someone up to speed, then make a judgement call at month nine on a two-year journey - without doing much to help the person get there. The conversation covers what the report found about the gap between the support leaders believe they provide and what their people actually experience, why tech sales retains people that real estate loses, how AI-driven talent engineering builds a personalised eighteen-month campaign around your best juniors, and what an agency has to do to make itself hard to raid. Both guests finish with something an agency owner can act on before Monday. Links, the full report and contact details for both guests are in the show notes.

  6. 31 July

    Episode 12 - 31 July 2026 | Allan Resigns, REIV Breaks Ranks, "Deposit Flicking" and more

    Victoria changed premiers this week after months of questions over debt, infrastructure, crime and integrity — and on the very same day, the REIV took what it called an unprecedented step and stood alongside the Opposition to demand the Consumer Legislation Amendment Bill 2026 be substantially redrafted. Consumer Affairs Victoria forced changes to one of the country's biggest rental application platforms, and a Melbourne band managed to pin almost every part of the housing crisis on real estate agents, landlords and property investors. Peter and Kasey also work through allegations of development land being flipped to associates in Melbourne's growth corridors, a seven-figure defamation judgment between competing Sydney agents, a Double Bay agency that collapsed while suing a former employee who has since died, and a NSW Supreme Court fight over what critics are calling "deposit flicking". Then there's Dashdot. Two months after a collapse that left hundreds of customers and employees owed millions, its founders are back — offering business coaching. Plus: the RBA's warning that housing has weakened more than expected, Queensland's claim of a record 50,000 homes under construction, the review of 46,210 Queensland social housing tenancies, Australia's 13 million spare bedrooms, and new Suburbtrends research on who really controls the country's commission pools. Every source referenced in this episode is listed at beforetheweekend.com. Got a guest suggestion or a story you want covered? hello@beforetheweekend.com

  7. 24 July

    Episode 11 - Agents in the Firing Line, with Mike Mortlock | 24th July 2026

    Episode 11 asks whether governments are addressing Australia's housing failures or redirecting public anger towards real estate agents. Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade begin with Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan's open letter to REIV CEO Toby Balazs and the dispute over compulsory reserve-price disclosure. They examine the REIV's alternative transparency model, Consumer Affairs Victoria's existing enforcement powers, the political timing of the intervention and the hostile online reaction that followed Peter's public response. The conversation then moves to New South Wales, where REINSW has taken the extraordinary step of asking Premier Chris Minns to remove Minister for Better Regulation and Fair Trading Anoulack Chanthivong, alleging that meaningful industry consultation has broken down. Mike Mortlock joins the program as Managing Director of MCG Quantity Surveyors, Treasurer of the Property Investment Professionals of Australia and host of the Geared for Growth podcast, which has been running since 2017 and has published more than 300 episodes. Mike discusses the 1.2 million-home target, Treasury's rent modelling, negative-gearing and capital-gains-tax reform, investor confidence, construction costs, SMSF borrowing changes and the conversations property managers should now be having with rental providers. The episode closes with Queensland's tougher social-housing behaviour policy, an allegation that a real estate employee disclosed a client's highly sensitive location and transaction details, and a direct warning about governments using the profession as a pre-election scapegoat. The final message is simple: agents did not create the housing shortage, and turning them into campaign villains will not solve it. Views expressed are those of the speakers. This episode contains general discussion only and is not legal, tax or financial advice. The privacy story is presented as an allegation and has not been independently verified in full.

  8. 17 July

    Episode 10 - REIQ LIFT 2026, Proptech Pulse and a Cooling Market | 17 July 2026

    Episode 10 marks a milestone for Before the Weekend, recorded fresh from one of the biggest weeks of the year for Queensland real estate and proptech. Peter Schravemade and Kasey McDonald give their honest assessment of REIQ LIFT 2026, including the strongest sessions, the energy in the room and the recurring message that technology only creates value when people can adopt, connect and trust it. Kasey also speaks with REISA Chair Cain Cooke about South Australia's resilient market, the importance of becoming a trusted adviser and using technology to create more time for human conversations. The pair recap Top of the Props, where Homesnoop claimed the judges' award and Crayons CRM won People's Choice, before unpacking the inaugural Proptech Pulse 2026. The report surveyed 146 Australian and New Zealand proptech leaders and found that change management, integration and customer adoption are now bigger challenges than building the technology itself. They also examine Queensland's sharp quarterly fall in property transactions, claims that Sydney's market is "dead", rising rents, the meaning of genuinely affordable housing, concerns prompted by updates to Forms Live contracts, and an agency incentive program designed to reward property managers on the same footing as sales teams. A practical and candid discussion for agents, property managers, principals, proptech founders and anyone working across Australia's property industry.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Before the Weekend is a weekly Australian real estate podcast hosted by Peter Schravemade and Kasey McDonald, bringing together industry leaders, property managers, regulators, technology founders and special guests from across the property sector. Each episode delivers practical, straight-talking discussion on the biggest stories shaping real estate across Australia, covering rental reforms, housing policy, compliance, property management, technology, consumer trust, investor sentiment and the future of the industry. Designed for agents, principals and property managers who want insight without the spin, Before the Weekend breaks down complex issues into real-world conversations that help the industry head into the weekend informed, prepared and thinking differently.

Information

  • Creator
    Before The Weekend
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    22
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Before The Weekend
  • Show Website
    Before the Weekend ☀️

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