Before the Weekend ☀️

Before The Weekend

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. 4d ago

    Episode 18: Reserves Seven Days Out, a Licence Lost and Housefishing in New Farm | 11 September 2026

    This week on Before the Weekend, Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade work through a week where the rules got stricter, and the people living under them got very little say in how. First, Victoria. Auctioneer and coach Andy Reid called Peter after last week's episode to say we had it slightly wrong, so he came on to fix it. After a briefing from Consumer Affairs Victoria's Nicole Rich, the draft clause that appeared to stop buyers making an offer until they had held the contract for 14 days has been put down to a typo - the contract now simply has to be available for 14 days before the auction. From 1 October the statement of information becomes the property price statement, "a statement of information on steroids" with detail on every comparable sale. The reserve has to be published seven calendar days out, and while it can come down during the auction it cannot go up. An offer above the reserve that is rejected on price resets the seven days; one rejected in writing on process does not. Campaigns launched before 1 October get two weeks' grace, so the auctions of 3 and 10 October run under the old rules. Andy's read is that auctions accelerate at the bottom of the market and drift away at the top, and his line on the new rules: "it's actually one of the best conditioning tools we've ever been given." Peter's worry is the week the market moves after the reserve is set, and he wants a month of results before he believes it. Then AUSTRAC. Section 167 notices started going out in late August to agencies that have not enrolled, a reminder that the deadline has passed. Then the story that divided the industry. McGrath Bulimba principal Tony O'Doherty has had his Queensland real estate licence cancelled over an assault in Ireland in 2013, when he was 23. He pleaded guilty by video link in November 2025 and received a two-year sentence, fully suspended. He is appealing, and McGrath is standing behind him. Kasey walks through what changes inside an office when the licensee goes, down to the form 6s and the name on the door, and Peter asks the harder question: at what point does society let someone move on, and what precedent does it set if it does? Then housefishing in New Farm. A rental listing at 22 Mark Street appears to have been built with AI images that bear little resemblance to the house. Peter, once called the catfisher of real estate from his years at BoxBrownie, draws the ethical line - a grey sky or a Queensland lawn can be fixed, power lines cannot - and says this one is beyond any disclaimer: walls stretched, power points gone, every image changed. Queensland's Property Occupations Act allows up to 540 penalty units for false or misleading representations, and Kasey asks what rights a tenant has if they signed without ever inspecting. Then Revenue NSW and the contractor who is really an employee. Most internal conjunction arrangements fail every payroll tax exemption, and section 47 can set aside the ones that pass. Also this week: Kasey reports back from the REIQ Property Insider Lunch, where Treasurer David Janetzki said loan applications and approvals are down and Queensland is not paying for Jim Chalmers' budget, and the AFR's John Kehoe put the tax changes at 60 basis points on an investor loan with transactions down about 15 per cent; the WA rent cap debate returns; and Kasey heads to PM/ONE in Sydney while Peter flies from PropTech Connect in London to the REACH gathering in Colorado. Before the Weekend is a weekly podcast for Australian property professionals, hosted by Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade. New episodes every Friday.

  2. Sep 4

    Episode 17: 500 Changes, the July 1 Valuation and a War on Auctions | 4 September 2026

    This week on Before the Weekend, Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade work through a week where every regulator wanted more from the industry and none of them wanted to talk to it. First, audits. NSW Fair Trading's strata and property taskforce finished a statewide sweep of agents holding consumer money: 34 businesses facing potential licence suspension, 41 overdue audits lodged, 32 warnings, three industry bans, six mandatory training orders and more than $200,000 in fines, with a Penrith agency losing its licence and copping $22,000. Nobody here is accused of stealing - they simply did not lodge the audit. Then the ones who did steal: a NSW property manager, 162 transactions and roughly $151,000 plus $36,000, gets a 12-month community sentence, while a Brisbane operator who took $131,000 gets four and a half years jail. Same crime, wildly different states. Then Scams Awareness Week and the email account somewhere in the transaction that criminals are watching for weeks. The rule is simple: anything over $5,000 gets a phone call before it moves. Then Victoria declares war on auctions. Reserves set 14 days out, a property price statement seven days before unconditional, all signed off by a premier who has since left the building. Peter's read is that buyers will simply drift to private treaty, which has no transparency at all. Then the Tenancy Skills Institute's Two Tides of Homelessness report - 327 property managers, nearly 126,000 tenancies, and 6.43 per cent of them at risk, up from 4.8 per cent a year ago. The finding that matters: in Queensland, portfolios with no referral pathway saw at-risk tenancies jump 150 per cent while those using PM Assist fell 18.47 per cent. Property managers themselves said 52 per cent of the 3,114 failed tenancies were preventable. Then a Gold Coast developer allegedly terminating five-year-old off-the-plan contracts under sunset clauses, the test case for the 2023 reform, and 1,522 NSW construction firms gone in a single financial year. Josh Stanton of Opteon joins to make sense of the 1 July 2027 valuation deadline from a regional desk in Gladstone: why metro investors should wait four to six weeks and regional ones until September or October, a worked Kirkwood example that lands $8,450 more tax under the new regime rather than the tens of thousands being reported, and the warning nobody else is making - do your renovations before 1 July, because the new system does not appear to treat them kindly. Then the interview that changes the mood. Aaron Barber, general manager of the REINSW, on 500 legislative changes in 18 months, a domestic violence regulation published on 7 June and handed to the institute on 7 August, and reforms that now require the property manager to notify the remaining co-tenant, change the locks and chase damage from a person who may be violent. Seven property managers have already refused the four-hour CPD course because it would be triggering. When Aaron asked the minister for a meeting, the response was: "You are playing games, stop playing games." Also this week: Kasey heads to the REIQ property insider luncheon, Peter packs for PropTech Connect in London and the REACH portfolio gathering in Boulder, a licensed conveyancer allegedly short nearly $1 million, and why your real estate institute membership just earned its keep. If anything in this episode is close to home, 1800RESPECT is 1800 737 732. Before the Weekend is a weekly podcast for Australian property professionals, hosted by Kasey McDonald and Peter Schravemade. New episodes every Friday.

  3. Aug 28

    Episode 16: A Developer's Collapse, the Rate Flip and Four Different Brisbanes | 28 August 2026

    This week on Before the Weekend, Kasey McDonald and Peter 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 all alleged at this point. 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. "Every source referenced in this episode is listed at beforetheweekend.com" Kasey McDonald → https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasey-mcdonald-tutaki-857a3337/ Peter Schravemade → https://www.linkedin.com/in/schravemade/

  4. Aug 21

    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.

  5. Aug 13

    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.

  6. Aug 10 ·  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.

  7. Aug 7

    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.

  8. Aug 5 ·  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.

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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
    25
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Before The Weekend
  • Show Website
    Before the Weekend ☀️

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