Samantha McLean

More than half of sellers in a new US survey kept the cameras rolling during open homes – and some are using the footage to negotiate. Whichever side of the deal you work, that changes the conversation.

A year after acquiring Domain, CoStar’s residential business has turned Adjusted EBITDA‑positive on the back of double‑digit revenue growth and aggressive AI rollouts across Homes and Apartments.

The Agency's co-founder has sat down with Elite Agent eleven times since 2017, and this is the distilled leadership playbook behind the CEO who still walks the floor daily.

In 2014 I called a rabbi to help promote an event. He spent 30 minutes working on me instead, told me the headline act belonged in jail, and asked me to picture the year 2034. We are past halfway now, and he isn't here for the rest of it.

She started on a Woolworths checkout, changing out of her school uniform on the bus, and has been in real estate since 1992 – agent, UK traveller, and for the past two decades the strategist Australia's property management businesses call when the numbers stop making sense. After mining the archives for other well-known real estate identities, Samantha McLean turned to the coach who has been writing for Elite Agent since the very beginning. What she found was a decade and a half of transcripts and columns from the founder of Real+ and PM/ONE — most of it aimed squarely at the part of the business that keeps the lights on. Here are just some of her best lessons.

The third spam crackdown of 2026 arrived on Tuesday 18 August with no blog post and no list of targets, which leaves agencies with the two things that were always going to decide it – proof you have actually been there, and something to say that isn't already on 400 other websites.

Seven months after a history-making trifecta at the International Property Awards, New Zealand's largest family-owned real estate company gathered its people in Auckland last week with a clear message from Managing Director Peter Thompson – the view from the top is no place to stand still.

In the first track of The Edit, Samantha McLean and Chris Hanley get past the easy answers on trust, hard vendor conversations and the operating rhythm that moves stock in a headwind market.

He started at LJ Hooker Bondi Junction in 1995, learned soft skills at a Hollywood acting school on Mike Ferry's orders, and went top ten at McGrath in his first year working commission-only. For most of the time since, Claudio Encina has been coaching Australia's best agents – including, these days, top performers at The Agency. After mining the archives for the wisdom of Chris Hanley and Matt Lahood, Samantha McLean went back in for the coach who has been a good friend, and a part of the Elite Agent story from the very beginning. She found more than twenty recordings spanning 2016 to 2022, most of them made in markets at least as hard as this one. Here are the lessons worth revisiting and keeping

In Track 02 of The Edit, Samantha McLean, Chris Hanley and Fiona Blayney examine the gap between managing people and developing them – and why AI efficiency cannot replace human coaching, communication and judgement.