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Quiet List offers real estate agents a secure platform to share off-market listings with buyer’s agents.
Michelle May, a buyer’s agent, said privacy and ease were the main reasons some sellers listed off-market.
Not all properties for sale are listed.Credit: Peter Rae
“Not all sellers want to hold twice-weekly opens with Joe Bloggs from down the street coming in for a sticky beak. For others, it could be because they’ve got small children and they don’t want to tidy up the house twice a week.”
Other sellers are deciding to go halfway off-market, using agencies who offer to list properties on their own websites and advertise them via email databases, but not on major portals.
One such Sydney agency, BresicWhitney, sold 1355 properties in 2025. Of those, 18 per cent were only listed on its website.
“We’ve noticed a growing preference for this approach, particularly in the past 24 months,” said BresicWhitney acting chief executive Will Gosse.
Stephen Hipsley, a business development manager in the pathology sector, bought an off-market two-bedroom townhouse on Sydney’s North Shore in December via BresicWhitney.
Steve Hipsley used a buyer’s agent to purchase his townhouse.Credit: Janie Barrett
Hipsley wanted to downsize to an affordable home that still had room for visits from his adult children and grandkids. He secured the services of a buyer’s agent, who received word that the townhouse was coming to market.
“The owners didn’t want to go through the stresses and traumas of an auction,” Hipsley said. “They showed me the property themselves.”
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Hipsley said he got a “warm feeling” from the owners, whose furniture was still in situ.
“It was a bit like buying from a friend. It really did take the stress out of it for me.”
Gosse said buyers such as Hipsley, and a growing number of sellers, found the off-market approach attractive because it allowed them to avoid increasingly cutthroat property markets in Sydney and elsewhere.
“Auctions are effective for buyers and sellers who are comfortable to participate in the process, but they’re not for everyone.”
He said buyers who had been through the auction process a few times without securing a home were generally more eager to pursue off-market properties, while some sellers wanted to transact without the hurly-burly of a marketing campaign.
However, he said that most sellers were still opting for the on-market auction format because “it brings competition to the surface”.
Domain president Jason Pellegrino said using a property portal maximised buyer reach.
“It also brings transparency to a campaign, ensuring expectations around price are set realistically.”
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May, the buyer’s agent, said sellers and buyers alike should approach the off-market phenomenon cautiously.
She said some unscrupulous real estate agents attempt to win listings by quoting inflated price guides and encouraging sellers to proceed off-market.
“They’ll promise a magic price in order to win the listing, then show it to one buyer off-market, at little cost to their own reputation, and tell the seller the price is actually way too high. By then, the seller has signed a contract and is stuck with the agent.”
May said other agents might attempt to sell a flawed property off-market in the hope it attracted less scrutiny than during a public campaign.
“A lot of off-markets are B-grade properties trying to achieve an A-grade price. So, when a buyer’s agent boasts: ‘We only buy off-market’, well, I don’t think that is necessarily a selling point.”
However, when handled ethically, May said the off-market approach could be a win-win.
“We do much of our best buying over Christmas because even though there’s less competition from buyers, some sellers with good properties simply don’t want to wait until February to do a full marketing campaign.”
