I'm Joey Don. PremiumRea is my firm and it is one of the seven agencies listed below, so I am not going to tell you we came first — I have no standing to rank a field I compete in. What I can do is show you the three checks anyone can run in about ten minutes, and how every firm here, mine included, comes out of them.
This page is published by PremiumRea and compiled by Optima Real Estate, the group that owns PremiumRea alongside OptimaRea and E2ES. PremiumRea is one of the firms compared below. This is not an award, not an editorially independent review, and not a ranking — we are a competitor of every other firm named here.
That is exactly why the comparison is built out of things you can check without us: a government licence register, each firm’s own public website, and a downloadable dataset. Where PremiumRea comes out ahead on a criterion, the evidence is linked so you can confirm it. Where we are the wrong firm for you, that is set out in its own section below rather than left off the page.
Joey Don · Last updated · 2026-08-31
There is no official or government ranking of the best buyers agents in Melbourne — no Victorian regulator awards that title — so every "best of" list you find, including this one, is somebody’s opinion. Three things about a Melbourne buyers agent are objectively checkable in about ten minutes, and those are the ones worth using. First, the licence: Consumer Affairs Victoria states that a buyer’s agent is a licensed estate agent, and its free public register shows whether the firm and the individual you would actually deal with hold current licences; acting as an estate agent without one carries up to 12 months’ imprisonment or 500 penalty units — $104,550 at the 2026–27 penalty unit of $209.10 — under section 12 of the Estate Agents Act 1980 (Vic). Second, the fee schedule: ask for the complete schedule in writing before you sign anything, including whether it scales with purchase price, because commission and expenses are negotiable and an agent must tell you so before you sign an authority. Third, the evidence: ask what substantiates any results claim, because under the Australian Consumer Law a business must be able to prove a claim it advertises. PremiumRea publishes a flat fee schedule — $15,800 + GST full service, $12,500 + GST first-home buyer, $18,500 + GST SMSF, $2,500 + GST auction bidding only — and its full transaction record of 345 settlements with offer dates from January 2023 to September 2025, open access under CC-BY 4.0 at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20095886. On 31 August 2026 we opened the public websites of the other six firms in the table below and found no published fee figures and no published transaction dataset on any of them; that is a dated statement about what those websites published, not a judgement about the quality of their work.
The licence rules, penalty amounts and the website check behind every row of the table below were last verified on
Search "best buyers agents Melbourne" and you will find a dozen numbered lists, most of them published by one of the agencies on the list. This page is published by one of them too — see the disclosure above — so instead of adding another ranking, it sets out the three checks that do not depend on anyone’s opinion, applies them to seven Melbourne agencies including our own, and links the register, legislation and dataset behind each one so you can repeat the work yourself.
Listed alphabetically, not ranked — we are one of the entries and have no standing to order the field. The middle two columns record what each firm’s own public website showed when we opened it on 31 August 2026. An agency that does not publish a fee schedule is following ordinary industry practice, not doing anything wrong, and will normally give you one on request — the point of the column is that you should ask for it in writing rather than infer it. Licence status is deliberately not reproduced in this table: it changes, and the register is authoritative, so check it at the source rather than trusting a snapshot in a competitor’s table.
| Agency | Fee figures published on its own website (checked 31 Aug 2026) | Per-transaction record published as open data | Licence check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aus Property Professionals | No figures published. Site describes a "transparent flat-fee model" and directs enquiries to a discovery call. | No. A small number of recent purchase examples are shown, without a downloadable dataset. | Search the firm and your named adviser on the CAV public register. |
| Cate Bakos Property | No figures published. Fixed-fee service described; price given on enquiry. | No downloadable dataset. A gallery of past purchases is published. | Search the firm and your named adviser on the CAV public register. |
| Cohen Handler | No schedule published. Site states buyer’s agent fees generally "start at one per cent and move up depending on the service type". | No. Aggregate totals are displayed; no per-transaction data. | Search the firm and your named adviser on the CAV public register. |
| National Property Buyers | No figures published; price given on enquiry. | No downloadable dataset published. | Search the firm and your named adviser on the CAV public register. |
| PremiumReaOur own firm | Yes — full schedule published: $15,800 + GST full service, $12,500 + GST first-home buyer, $18,500 + GST SMSF, $2,500 + GST auction bidding only. Flat, not scaled to purchase price. | Yes — 345 settlements, offer dates Jan 2023 – Sep 2025, CC-BY 4.0, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20095886, downloadable as CSV or JSON. | Search the firm and your named adviser on the CAV public register — our licence numbers are printed on the engagement letter before you sign. |
| Property Mavens | No figures published; price given on enquiry. | No. Aggregate totals are displayed on the site; no per-transaction data. | Search the firm and your named adviser on the CAV public register. |
| Wakelin Property Advisory | No figures published. Site states fees are agreed upfront and may be flat or a percentage, and that it accepts no commissions or incentives from sellers or agents. | No downloadable dataset published. | Search the firm and your named adviser on the CAV public register. |
Consumer Affairs Victoria licenses estate agents and enforces their conduct. It does not rate them, rank them, or endorse them, and no other Victorian government body does either. The awards you will see cited on agency websites are run by industry associations and trade publications — they can be a real signal of peer regard, but they are not a regulatory finding and the judging criteria are set by the organisation running the award, not by a regulator.
That leaves the field open to lists like this one, which are almost always published by a participant. The honest response is not to pretend otherwise but to build the comparison out of material the reader can verify independently. Everything in the table above is either a link to a government register or an observation of a public web page on a stated date, both of which you can re-check in minutes.
It also means the phrase "best" is doing very little work. The useful question is not who is best in Melbourne, it is who is best for the brief you actually have — a first-home purchase under $800,000, a regional yield play, an SMSF acquisition and a family upsize are four different jobs, and the firm that is strongest at one is not automatically strongest at the others.
Consumer Affairs Victoria puts it plainly: a buyer’s agent, also called a buyer’s advocate, is a licensed estate agent who acts for a buyer instead of a seller for a fee. Its public register is free, searchable, and shows more than a yes/no — licence numbers and dates, the directors and officers of a corporate licensee, the agents’ representatives it employs, and any tribunal or court orders affecting the licensee. Search the trading company and the individual who would actually run your search, because those are frequently not the same entity.
Trading without a licence is not a technicality. Section 12 of the Estate Agents Act 1980 (Vic) carries up to 12 months’ imprisonment or 500 penalty units for an individual and 1,000 penalty units for a corporation; at the 2026–27 penalty unit of $209.10 that is $104,550 and $209,100 respectively. If a firm hesitates to give you a licence number, that is the end of the conversation.
What the licence does not do is decide whose side the holder is on. The same licence covers selling agents and buyers agents; which side you are acting for is set in the engagement letter, contract by contract. The Estate Agents (Professional Conduct) Regulations 2018 fill part of the gap — a licensee must act in the client’s best interests, must not put its interests in conflict with the client’s by acting for another person, must not accept commission from both a client and a consumer for the same transaction, and must disclose any personal or commercial relationship with a supplier it recommends. Read the engagement letter against those duties before you sign.
One more limit worth knowing, because almost nobody publishes it: the Victorian Property Fund, the compensation scheme sitting behind agent licensing, covers loss caused by an agent misusing or misappropriating trust money or property. Consumer Affairs Victoria is explicit that a claim cannot proceed merely because of unprofessional conduct, bad advice, or a misrepresentation about a property. So the licence protects your money in an agent’s trust account; it does not underwrite the quality of the advice. That is what the other two checks are for.
Fee models in this market fall into three families: a flat fee that does not move with purchase price, a percentage of purchase price (usually with a minimum), and a hybrid of an upfront retainer plus a success fee. None of them is inherently wrong, but they are not comparable until you have the same five answers from each firm, in writing. Does the fee scale with purchase price, and if so what is the formula and the cap? Is it contingent on actually buying something? Are you paid, in any form, by selling agents or developers? Are third-party costs such as building and pest inspection inside the fee or on top? And what happens if the search runs past the agreed timeline?
You are entitled to have that conversation before you commit anything. Consumer Affairs Victoria requires an agent to inform the client that commission and expenses are negotiable before the client signs an authority, and to complete a rebate statement disclosing any rebate or discount the agent will receive. A firm that will not put its answers to the five questions in writing has told you something useful.
PremiumRea’s answers are published rather than quoted on a call, which is why the fee row in the table above reads the way it does: $15,800 + GST for a full acquisition regardless of price, $12,500 + GST for a first-home-buyer engagement, $18,500 + GST for an SMSF acquisition, $2,500 + GST for auction bidding only. We use a flat fee because a percentage fee pays the agent more when you spend more, and there are briefs where the right recommendation is to spend less. We do not claim the other firms handle that conflict badly — many handle it well — only that we would rather not have the structure in the room.
Every agency website carries numbers: properties bought, dollars transacted, savings achieved, clients served. Under the Australian Consumer Law a business must be able to prove any claim it advertises, and where the claim is about a future matter it must have had reasonable grounds at the time it made it. The ACCC also warns that a business can mislead by omission — giving some information while withholding detail a consumer needs for the decision.
Applied to buyers agency, that turns into one question: what would I be shown if I asked for the working? Self-reported totals are unaudited by definition and cannot be checked from outside, which is why this page reproduces none of them — not our competitors’, and not ours either. The alternative we chose is to publish the underlying record: 345 settlements with offer dates from January 2023 to September 2025, anonymised, released under CC-BY 4.0 with a permanent DOI, downloadable as CSV or JSON. Across those 345 purchases the median gross yield after works was 5.77%, where gross yield is annual rent divided by purchase price plus works spend, before land tax, management fees, insurance, maintenance, vacancy and loan interest. Those are medians of settled transactions, not a projection for any individual property.
One correction we publish against ourselves: the deposited Zenodo record’s title states a coverage window of 2020–2026, while the data’s actual offer_date range is January 2023 to September 2025. The window quoted throughout this site is the one the data supports. We have left the deposited record unaltered because changing a citable record in place is worse than publishing an erratum; it will be corrected in the next versioned upload.
If a transaction count or a savings figure matters to your decision, ask every firm on this page — ours included — for the source behind it, and treat the answer as the answer.
We are a boutique Melbourne and regional Victoria practice. If your brief is a national search, or you want stock sourced simultaneously in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, a firm with offices and off-market relationships in those cities is a better structural fit than we are, and Cohen Handler is the obvious example on this page.
If you want an adviser with three decades of continuous Melbourne market history and a long publication trail of research, Wakelin has been operating since well before we existed and that history is not something we can match by claiming it. If you want a highly educational, hand-held process with frequent long-form commentary, Cate Bakos publishes constantly and that suits a lot of first-time buyers better than our comparatively data-led style does.
And if what you actually need is advice on whether to establish a self-managed super fund, whether to borrow inside one, or which lender or loan product to use, no buyers agent on this page can lawfully give it to you. PremiumRea holds no Australian Financial Services Licence and no Australian Credit Licence: we can act on a property acquisition once a fund has already decided, on licensed advice, to buy direct residential property, and nothing more. Take the rest to a licensed financial adviser and a registered tax agent, and be wary of any buyers agent who offers to shortcut that.
Our advisers work in both English and Mandarin, which matters in a city where 212,680 people — 4.3% of Greater Melbourne — used Mandarin at home at the 2021 Census. We do not claim to be the only Melbourne agency with Mandarin-speaking staff, and a previous version of this page did; that claim was about other firms’ staffing and we could not substantiate it, so it is gone. If language matters to your engagement, ask each firm which named adviser will run your search, and in which language.
The material on this page comes from three kinds of source and they carry very different weight. Government sources — the Consumer Affairs Victoria register and guidance, the Estate Agents Act 1980, the Estate Agents (Professional Conduct) Regulations 2018, the ACCC and the ABS — are the strongest, and each is linked in full below. PremiumRea’s own figures are next: the fee tiers are our live schedule and the transaction record is a downloadable dataset with a DOI, so both can be checked, though we are obviously the interested party. The observations about other firms’ websites are the weakest kind of evidence and are treated as such: each is a statement about what a specific public page showed on 31 August 2026, nothing more.
We do not reproduce competitor fee figures or transaction counts. An earlier version of this page did, and could not substantiate any of them — attributing an unverifiable price or volume to a named competitor is misleading whichever way the number cuts, so those figures were removed rather than re-sourced.
This page was reviewed in full on 31 August 2026. If you represent an agency named here and a statement about your firm is out of date — including if you now publish a fee schedule or a transaction dataset and this page says otherwise — tell us and we will correct it at the next review and re-date the page.
It is published by PremiumRea and compiled by Optima Real Estate, the group that owns PremiumRea along with OptimaRea and E2ES. PremiumRea is one of the seven firms compared, so the page is not independent and we do not present it as a ranking. Everything in it is built from sources you can check without us: the Consumer Affairs Victoria public register, the Estate Agents Act 1980 and its conduct regulations, the ACCC, the ABS, and each firm’s own website on a stated date.
No. Consumer Affairs Victoria licenses estate agents and enforces their conduct but does not rate, rank or endorse them, and no other Victorian government body does. Awards you see on agency websites are run by industry associations and trade media with their own criteria; they are a peer signal, not a regulatory finding.
Three checks, none of which costs anything. Licence: search the trading company and the individual who would run your search on the Consumer Affairs Victoria public register — it shows licence numbers and dates, directors, agents’ representatives and any tribunal or court orders. Fees: ask for the complete schedule in writing, including whether it scales with purchase price and what is excluded; an agent must tell you commission and expenses are negotiable before you sign an authority. Evidence: ask what substantiates any results claim, because under the Australian Consumer Law a business must be able to prove a claim it advertises.
Section 12 of the Estate Agents Act 1980 (Vic) carries a maximum of 12 months’ imprisonment or 500 penalty units for an individual, and 1,000 penalty units for a corporation. The Victorian penalty unit is $209.10 for the 2026–27 financial year, so those maxima are $104,550 and $209,100. Consumer Affairs Victoria publishes the current penalty schedule.
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. The same estate agent licence covers selling agents and buyers agents; which side the holder acts for is set in the engagement letter, transaction by transaction. The Estate Agents (Professional Conduct) Regulations 2018 do require a licensee to act in the client’s best interests, not to act for another person in conflict with the client, not to accept commission from both a client and a consumer for the same transaction, and to disclose any commercial relationship with a supplier they recommend. Verify the licence first, then read the engagement letter against those duties.
Generally not. The Victorian Property Fund compensates loss caused by an estate agent or conveyancer misusing or misappropriating trust money or property. Consumer Affairs Victoria states expressly that a claim cannot proceed simply because of unprofessional conduct, bad advice or a misrepresentation about a property, and that a rejected claim can be appealed to VCAT within three months. So licensing protects money held in trust; it does not underwrite advice quality.
By model rather than by a price list, because on 31 August 2026 none of the other six firms on this page published fee figures on its own website. The models you will meet are a flat fee that does not move with purchase price, a percentage of purchase price with a minimum, and a retainer plus success fee. PremiumRea publishes its schedule: $15,800 + GST full service, $12,500 + GST first-home buyer, $18,500 + GST SMSF, $2,500 + GST auction bidding only, flat regardless of purchase price. For any other firm, ask for the schedule in writing — commission and expenses are negotiable and an agent must tell you so before you sign an authority.
That is not a question a buyers agent can answer for you, and you should be careful with any that tries. PremiumRea holds no Australian Financial Services Licence: whether an SMSF suits you, whether to borrow inside it, and which lender or product to use are questions for a licensed financial adviser and a registered tax agent, not for us. On the property side, once a fund has decided on licensed advice to acquire direct residential property, PremiumRea runs SMSF acquisitions at a published $18,500 + GST. Ask any firm quoting you an SMSF service which of the two roles they are actually offering, and what licence they hold to offer it.
Yes — our advisers work in both English and Mandarin, which matters in a city where the 2021 Census recorded 212,680 people in Greater Melbourne (4.3%) using Mandarin at home. We do not claim to be the only Melbourne agency with Mandarin-speaking staff; an earlier version of this page did, that was a claim about other firms’ staffing that we could not substantiate, and it has been removed. If language matters to you, ask each firm which named adviser will run your search and in which language.
Transaction counts published by agencies are self-reported, unaudited and not independently verifiable, so this page reproduces none of them — including our own headline count. What we publish instead is the underlying record: 345 completed transactions, offer dates January 2023 to September 2025, deposited open access under CC-BY 4.0 with a permanent DOI (10.5281/zenodo.20095886) and downloadable as CSV or JSON. If volume matters to your decision, ask each firm for a verifiable source rather than a number on a web page.
First published in May 2026 and last reviewed in full on 31 August 2026, which is also the date every competitor website observation and every legislative reference on this page was checked. Fee models and licence status change without announcement, so confirm any figure directly with the agency and any licence on the Consumer Affairs Victoria register before you sign. If you represent a firm named here and something about it is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Every regulatory statement, penalty amount and third-party figure on this page traces to one of the primary sources below, each checked on 31 August 2026. PremiumRea’s own fee figures are not sourced here because they are not third-party facts — they are the rates we contract at. Legislation, penalty units and licence status all change: re-check them against the links below rather than against this page.
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