Real estate agents advertising the most inaccurate property prices boast near flawless ratings on the nation’s largest listing platforms, prompting concerns buyers are being duped by online review systems that fail to capture – and have loopholes allowing agents to thwart – negative feedback.
An investigation by this masthead has also revealed the lengths to which some agents are going to maintain their ratings, with some deploying defamation threats, while others use backend hacks to block bad reviews.
When buyers search for homes on the two biggest platforms – realestate.com.au and Domain – listings also include reviews and an accompanying star rating for the agent selling the property.
However, new analysis from property data transparency tool Homer has found that agents who were the most likely to give an inaccurate price guide also had near-perfect star ratings and scant, if any, negative reviews.
“The review system doesn’t just fail to identify the bad apples — it actively endorses them,” Henry Pedersen, chief executive of Homer, said.
Homer assesses an agent’s likelihood of underpricing a property by looking at the average gap between two key publicly available pricing markers on all of their sales: a property’s initial price guide, which can be hidden in states where laws allow it and can change as a campaign progresses, and its final sale value. This produces an agent’s average pricing error score. The platform is marketed to buyers and sellers as a tool to help them assess the accuracy of real estate agents’ price guides.
Assessing all sales in the 18 months up to May, Homer produced a list of the 50 agents in every state and territory with the highest pricing error scores. This masthead then cross-referenced these agents’ ratings on realestate.com.au and Domain.
A clear trend emerged: almost all are presented as outstanding agents with zero complaints. On the nation’s leading listing platform, realestate.com.au, these agents’ median rating is a perfect five stars, across every state.
One reason for the overwhelmingly positive skew is that most reviews are left by sellers, who are likely to be happy when a property’s sale price exceeds early estimates. Platforms only allow vendors and successful buyers to leave reviews for agents. Those who miss out on a property are barred from airing their experiences.
Spokespeople for both realestate.com.au and Domain conceded their prominently displayed agent ratings better measure vendor satisfaction – who benefit from underquoting – and are not intended to endorse agents for prospective buyers.
Consumer authorities have also cautioned against trusting online agent reviews. A NSW Fair Trading spokesman, asked about agent reviews on realestate.com.au and Domain failing to capture negative sentiment, encouraged buyers to check the state government’s “Name and Shame” register of agents for a more complete picture of performance.
A Consumer Affairs Victoria spokesman, responding to the same questions, said buyers should be wary of testimonials that are only extremely positive.
‘No useful signal whatsoever’
Most states have rigorous laws against underquoting. In NSW, agents must make reasonable estimates of selling prices and never publish a price lower than those estimates.
Rules are stricter in Victoria, where agents cannot advertise a property below what they think it will sell for or the vendor’s reserve price.
Additionally, in both states, when advertising a price range as a guide, the higher figure cannot exceed the lower by more than 10 per cent.
This masthead is not suggesting the agents with the highest pricing error scores used for the analysis in this article have been found to have breached underquoting laws. Rather, it is highlighting the potentially misleading dynamic that buyers face.
On realestate.com.au, the 50 most inaccurate agents in NSW guided prices an average of 16.2 per cent below their sale price, according to the figures gathered by Homer. Yet, all but four of them hold five-star ratings. The lowest-rated of them has 4.8 stars.
In Victoria, the 50 agents with the highest pricing error scores – who guided prices on average 7.1 per cent above eventual sale prices – are equally well-rated. Just one agent had a rating below 4.9.
Reviews for these same agents on rival platform Domain (which sources data from RateMyAgent) were slightly lower, but still overwhelmingly positive. The median rating for NSW’s 50 agents most prone to underestimating a sale price is 4.95 stars. In Victoria, just six were not rated 4.9 or above.
Pedersen says the existing review systems posed little incentive for agents to price properties accurately.
“You can consistently sell 17 per cent above your price guide and still maintain a perfect five-star rating,” he said. “How can the agents who do the right thing stand out?
“A buyer relying on those ratings is getting no useful signal whatsoever,” Pedersen said.
Review eligibility
Just 5 per cent of Australians trust real estate agents, according to a 2023 Roy Morgan survey of 100,000 respondents, with dishonesty found to be the driving factor.
Despite this mistrust, negative reviews on realestate.com.au and Domain are nearly non-existent. This is largely because prospective buyers – the people agents deal with most – cannot publicly review their experiences with underquoting, being spammed with communications or other grievances.
But even successful buyers who are entitled to leave a review must navigate cumbersome processes – which platforms say ensure genuine reviews – to proactively post their opinions. Some are also being blocked from doing so.
This has allowed agents statistically proven to be the most deceitful to maintain polished ratings. For example, Josh Tesolin, Sydney’s highest earning agent who has been banned from the industry for 10 years after reporting from this masthead and an investigation that found he engaged in sustained unlawful, improper and dishonest conduct on more than 100 property transactions, maintained a perfect 5-star rating before his ban.
Across both platforms, reviews are generally left via a personalised link sent by the agent, a tactic critics say is reserved only for guaranteed positive feedback. Buyers who proactively lodge a review face a more onerous process, including providing proof of purchase, which is not required for agent-invited reviews.
Consequently, vendors leave about two-thirds of all reviews on realestate.com.au.
Once submitted, reviews face strict moderation. Comments regarding an agent’s post-purchase behaviour can be deemed non-compliant and removed. Agents can also easily report any review they deem untruthful or defamatory for removal, a loophole this masthead found is frequently exploited.
Defamation threats, backend tricks
When *Therese bought her family home at auction last year, she initially left a glowing review for her agent, from LJ Hooker, on realestate.com.au.
But after settlement, Therese felt the agent had misrepresented remedy works to be completed before handover, and that a supplied building and pest report was not thorough.
When Therese updated her review to reflect this, it was removed within days after the agent flagged it as inaccurate.
Soon after, Therese received a legal letter from the agent’s lawyer demanding $50,000, the removal of the negative review (even though it had already been removed) and a cease to all commentary. The letter, sighted by this masthead, threatened defamation proceedings if the demands weren’t met within seven days.
“My overwhelming emotion was shock. I was in disbelief,” Therese said. “It’s been such a stressful period.”
Despite this, she tried to lodge a third review documenting the legal threat, motivated by the fact that the agent’s five-star profile had originally instilled a false sense of trust in her.
But Therese couldn’t update her review. The agent had removed the address from the listing, replacing it with “Address available on request”. Crucially, this backend hack means the property cannot be found in realestate.com.au’s search tool, preventing buyers from verifying their purchase to leave a review.
Therese was furious. She complained, and the platform conceded the tactic’s ability to silence her, and so temporarily added the listing’s address again.
However, if her new review detailed the agent’s full conduct, it risked being removed again for violating terms and conditions by commenting “outside the transaction”, or being flagged once more for defamation.
“You realise that no matter how many times you edit your review to try to keep it inside these terms … you may never get to honestly review them. If you talk about the agent’s full conduct, and feel they misrepresented something to you, then your review can just be shut down.”
The experience has led her to warn others about being lulled into a sense of confidence based on an agent’s rating.
“We all just want honest real estate agents, but there really is no point in allowing reviews if it’s so difficult for anything but a positive review to exist,” Therese said.
A spokeswoman for REA Group, realestate.com.au’s parent company, said Therese’s subsequent review met its terms. It has now been published, chipping Therese’s agent’s five-star rating to 4.9.
“We value the integrity of ratings and reviews, and we take any interference with the process very seriously,” the REA spokeswoman said.
In a joint statement, LJ Hooker and the agent in question said they took the matters seriously, welcomed independent feedback, and contested Therese’s account of misrepresentations. They did not respond to questions about the $50,000 demand and defamation threat.
Therese’s case is far from isolated. This masthead has learnt of at least four further instances of agents either flagging reviews as defamatory or engaging lawyers to send defamation action threats to silence negative reviews, with a source saying such tactics are widespread.
‘Exceptional’ for sellers
Critics argue the review systems function exactly as intended, given that agents – not buyers – generate revenue for the platforms by paying fees to list their properties.
“The platforms that host agent reviews also depend on those agents for their listings revenue …It’s always going to be a commercial balance for them as to how to moderate and design these systems,” Pedersen said.
In response to questions, REA defended its review system, noting it routinely investigates disputed reviews and frequently declines to remove substantiated negative feedback.
However, it conceded the “vast majority” of agent reviews are highly rated, stating its ratings “capture the whole experience of working with an agent and [are] not based purely on pricing accuracy”.
Costar, the US real estate giant that acquired Domain for $3 billion last year, similarly stated that reviews are not a compliance mechanism for underquoting. A spokeswoman said Domain doesn’t draw connections between pricing accuracy and agents’ star ratings.
RateMyAgent, from which Domain sources reviews, said high ratings for serial underquoters highlight “a systemic issue with how properties are priced and marketed in Australia, rather than a failure of our review system”.
“From a seller’s perspective, an agent who secures a final price 15 per cent to 30 per cent above the initial guide has delivered an exceptional financial result, which naturally earns a 5-star review,” a RateMyAgent spokesman said.
“RateMyAgent exists to host authentic feedback from the transaction, and the data proves these agents are delivering exactly what their vendor clients hired them to do,” they said.
The platform conceded that blocking unsuccessful prospective buyers from leaving reviews is a “trade-off” to ensure every review was “authentic”.
RateMyAgent maintains it only removes reviews for fraud, defamation, or community standard breaches – not differences of opinion.
It also said that 1.6 per cent of all reviews left in 2025 were removed, mostly because its investigation found that the reviewer and the real estate agent shared a digital footprint, such as the same Wi-Fi network or device, or that they failed to verify their email address.
This admission is in line with several examples this masthead heard of agents sending review invitation links to their friends, instead of actual clients, to write a glowing review.
*Not a real name
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Elias Visontay is a National Consumer Affairs Reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.