The new generation of real estate agents: Supercars, white teeth and designer loafers

According to KPMG Australia, there was a 30 per cent increase in real estate agents in Australia in the decade to 2024. Nearly 109,000 of them are currently out there, hoping to hook their next big sales commission. (By comparison, the number of farmers dropped 13 per cent to just fewer than 145,000.) It’s a competitive arena, of course, peopled by ambitious property fortune-hunters who work as hard on their brand of showy chutzpah as their ability to close the deal. Some have even cracked “the big time” on real estate shows Luxe Listings Sydney, The Block and Listing Melbourne.

With his brilliant-white teeth, razor-sharp suit (short pants reveal designer loafers worn sans socks), bulletproof quiff and glittering, bejewelled watch, Sydney agent Amir Jahan looks like the real estate agent from central casting. When he had a property to offload in the city’s gritty outer suburbs, a world away from the glittering, harbourside, billionaire enclaves, he used a million dollars’ worth of hired luxury supercars parked in the Hinchinbrook drive of the listing to appeal to prospective buyers.

In June a film crew captured the high-octane auto moment in a mini-Fast & Furious-style video to sell the modest home. “You’ve got to stand out,” explains Jahan, 26, who came to Australia as an Iraqi refugee in 2005. “I’m fishing, the cars are my bait and they lure the buyer through the front door.” It worked. The brick veneer house, located one hour’s drive south-west from the CBD, sold for $1.46 million, a “street record”.

In Melbourne, Listing Melbourne star Zed Nasheet, 35, offers business cards featuring his face superimposed on a $100 note. “I’m not doing it to draw attention: this is my authentic self, this is my natural energy level,” says the slick, fast-talking agent, who was 13 when he came with his family from Afghanistan in 2003. He also likes flash cars and the good life, and while his exuberant, motivational Instagram sermons bear the hallmarks of a televangelist, he has little time for religion or romance. “I married my job,” he says. “I’ve experienced adversity; it drives me to succeed.”

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