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From sewers to syndicates: Australia's drug demand fuels billion-dollar crime

From sewers to syndicates: Australia's drug demand fuels billion-dollar crime

7NEWSa day ago
Australia's insatiable appetite for illicit drugs is fuelling demand from international crime groups and drug dealers cashing in on the lucrative market.
Analysis of wastewater by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, in partnership with universities, detected a growth in consumption of major illicit drugs around the nation.
Methylamphetamine (ice), cocaine and heroin were all found at record highs in the latest analysis, which began in 2016.
More than 22 tonnes of those three drugs, as well as MDMA (ecstasy), was consumed in Australia in the year to August 2024, according to the wastewater analysis.
It has boosted the illicit drug trade and the profits for organised criminals, with an estimated $11.5 billion being spent.
Ice consumption rose to an estimated 12.8 tonnes.
Cocaine use increased almost 70 per cent, MDMA almost 50 per cent, and heroin almost 15 per cent.
The commission's drug specialist Shane Neilson said the market was rebounding after consumption dropped amid tighter border controls and lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Large profits from a consumer base willing and able to pay higher prices than other global markets are driving the business.
Drug traffickers will throw tonnes of product at Australia's borders, knowing whatever gets through will make enough money to outweigh losses from seizures, some of which outweigh total detected annual consumption, Mr Neilson said.
'It's just a relentless determination of transnational and domestic serious and organised crime groups to continue to supply the Australian market,' he said.
Organised crime groups are also thought to be fuelling a rise in illicit tobacco, but while nicotine consumption reversed a decline in the second half of 2024, it's impossible to determine what proportion of it was obtained on the black market.
Ketamine use is also on the rise.
Forensic analysts believe the majority of the general anaesthetic being consumed is imported and illicit, with the drug's use in medical and veterinary settings less prevalent.
It's the same for cannabis, despite thousands of people being medically prescribed.
'Although the number of users of medicinal cannabis is increasing, it's small relative to the overall use of cannabis,' Mr Neilson said.
The nation's multi-billion-dollar splurge on illicit drugs sends profits solely to organised criminals, the crime commission said.
'There is no taxation on these profits, and economically it does have an impact,' Mr Neilson said.
The latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey suggests nearly one-in-two Australians aged 14 and over (10.2 million people) had illicitly used a drug at some point in their lifetime including the non-medical use of pharmaceuticals.
An estimated one in five (3.9 million) used in the past 12 months.
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Why the dark truth of domestic violence is unbelievable
Why the dark truth of domestic violence is unbelievable

Perth Now

time2 hours ago

  • Perth Now

Why the dark truth of domestic violence is unbelievable

When police quizzed forensic psychologist Helen Paterson about the crimes of a serial arsonist, she had a lightbulb moment that illuminated her career. Now arguably Australia's leading researcher on domestic violence memory, she was then a Canadian exchange student living in a cheap Sydney apartment. There was a firebug residing in her building who kept setting it alight and during repeated questioning from police, "I gathered that the questions they were asking were not the questions I was learning about in academia that they should be asking". "I realised there's a disconnect between what's happening in the ivory tower of academia and the real world," she says. "Is the advice they're getting from academia not practical or are they just not hearing it? So that's what sparked my interest." After completing a PhD on the risks of witnesses discussing crimes and the impact on their memories, the University of Sydney academic conducted years of research on how to ask questions about single-event crimes before the impact of COVID prompted a focus switch. "I was seeing the increases in domestic and family violence rates, and it was terrible," she explains. At first she considered stepping back into the real world to volunteer part-time in a family violence refuge but then realised she could use her position within the university to fight for abused women to be heard and believed. Her subsequent groundbreaking research has made her a finalist in the country's leading science awards, the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes, in a new category of Excellence in Forensic Science. Dr Paterson's work addresses a crucial issue at the intersection of psychology and law: how to support victim-survivors of domestic violence in providing credible, accurate and admissible court testimony. "When people recall a repeated event, it can become less detailed because we stick to the script of what would typically happen," she says. "But detail is really important because the judge, jury and police officers see detail as being indicative of higher credibility." Her laboratory studies reached the disturbing conclusion that the more often a domestic violence survivor is victimised, the less likely they are to be believed. Because many situations involve divorce and child custody, people also believe "there is some potential motivation to tell a lie", she says. As a result, "people are always judging them within that context". Repeat victims also make "internal intrusion" errors, she adds, where they can mix up a Tuesday event with a Thursday event. "And then it's defence 101 for lawyers to say, 'he was out of town on the Thursday, so it couldn't have been him and we think you're making everything up'." Former NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery, KC, believes Dr Paterson's findings have had direct application in policing and criminal prosecution and contributed to improving evidence reliability and credibility. Her research has been used to train police, provide objective reassurance to victims and improve forensic outcomes, he says. "Her work (as an expert witness and otherwise) has enabled court practices to evolve in a scientifically supported manner and, ultimately, many victims to be relieved of ongoing abuse," Mr Cowdery says. "That is no mean achievement." Australian Bureau of Statistics data estimates one in four women and one in eight men have experienced violence by an intimate partner or family member since age 15. Even so, exasperated anti-violence advocates launched a national online forum in the lead-up to the May federal election, citing the fact virtually no political attention had been paid to the crisis during the campaign. "To truly stop domestic, family and sexual violence, to keep families strong and communities safe, we must stop the violence at its source," organiser and No to Violence CEO Phillip Ripper said at the time. "We are looking forward to hearing from some of our leaders on how they will make that happen." But more disconcerting still than the raw victim data, the bureau points to domestic violence matters having a 77 per cent conviction rate compared to non-DV cases achieving a rate of 92 per cent. It's here that the results of Dr Paterson's lab work provide insight into crucial contributing factors. Participants in her studies either watch one video of domestic violence or four videos of domestic violence that are similar with the same perpetrator but different events. The four-video participants are asked to describe the last video they viewed and the researchers compare how memory is affected by multiple events. "What's interesting is if we video these people and show it to mock jurors and get them to rate their credibility, they rate the repeated event participants as less honest, less cognitively competent and less credible," she says. "That's really problematic because it potentially means the more repeatedly you are victimised, the less likely you are to be believed." But "it gets worse than that" because in the studies where participants are instructed to lie about having witnessed a domestic violence event, their credibility is rated the same as single-event witnesses. "So that tells us (repeat-event witnesses) are also less likely to be believed than people who are lying … which is really concerning," Dr Paterson says. Her research also shows repeat-event witnesses are more likely to use hedge words such as "think", "perhaps" and "maybe", which could contribute to lower credibility ratings. It's a pattern observed among study participants but could even be more pronounced in the context of domestic violence. "If we consider the experience of someone who has been repeatedly gaslit and subjected to coercive control, it's highly likely their confidence would be impacted," Dr Paterson says. Gaslighting, which is a form of coercive control, is another crucial element of the research. So how does the justice system improve victim outcomes in the face of such challenges? Dr Paterson says it is crucial to educate judges, juries, lawyers and police officers about memory. "We need them to hear from experts who can tell them that this is what we expect of repeated event memory," she says. "We expect it to be less detailed ... that they might use more hedge words but what they're saying is typically quite accurate in that it happened to them, although they may confuse details of one event with another. "And when you do give that kind of expert testimony, people don't rate victims as being less credible when they have a more thorough understanding." 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) Lifeline 13 11 14 Men's Referral Service 1300 766 491

‘Biggest liar gets the listing': The tricks some agents use to pressure home sellers
‘Biggest liar gets the listing': The tricks some agents use to pressure home sellers

Sydney Morning Herald

time5 hours ago

  • Sydney Morning Herald

‘Biggest liar gets the listing': The tricks some agents use to pressure home sellers

Tom Panos credits himself with being Australia's top real estate coach, so when he arrives at an agency for a private training session, agents take note. After all, his Real Estate Gym website has about 20,000 subscribers, who pay to learn the art of selling real estate – or what he dubs in one training video as the 'list, reduce, sell strategy'. It is a familiar scenario for many Australian home sellers, whether they know it or not. Panos describes it as 'vendor management', but it is easily confused with the more manipulative practice known as 'vendor conditioning' that is commonly derided in the industry. Vendor conditioning is a dirty, open secret in the property industry that is practised by many agents despite the fact they are being paid to act in the vendor's best interests. It's a process whereby an agent exaggerates or blatantly lies about a property's value to get the listing, only to start massaging the seller's expectations down once the agency agreement is signed. 'It's one of the more dubious tactics that are out there in the industry,' said Louis Christopher, managing director of SQM Research. Whether you call it vendor conditioning or management, few sellers imagine that's what they are signing up for when they welcome an agent into their home. Panos outlined his tips, later posted briefly as a video to social media and watermarked as part of his training website, in a session at the office of high-profile agent Josh Tesolin, whose licence was recently suspended for four months by NSW Fair Trading following an investigation by this masthead's Bidding Blind investigation. 'It all starts at the listing presentation. Trust me. That's where the process starts,' Panos instructed Tesolin and about half a dozen others. 'When you go to the listing, what you do is you win the listing, and you give them hope.' Then comes the 'set-to-sell meeting'. This is no time for small talk, Panos said. 'Go in early with the bad news. 'We need to realign the value of your property from initial expectations by 5 per cent because I'd rather be sitting with you next week negotiating offers than having no offers'.' Panos denies there is anything wrong with his strategy to shape vendor expectations, adding there's a difference between training agents to factor in emotional buyers who will pay more for a property, and training agents to effectively buy the listing with lies. Panos told this masthead the video was intended to train agents for handling tough markets, such as when interest rates rise, and related to a conversation held with vendors a week or so after the property was listed. Lies and 'distasteful' manipulation Whistleblowing agents and property insiders working across Melbourne and Sydney said the practice of deliberately manipulating vendors through lies and other dirty tactics, first by getting them to list their house with them and then convincing them to sell their property quickly, was 'common'. Two former Melbourne real estate agents, who spoke anonymously to detail practices at their previous workplaces, said sellers would also be 'harshly conditioned' to accept less money than they originally hoped, or to get a quick sale. In one technique, detailed by a former agent at a major real estate franchise, vendors were given a report containing negative buyer feedback, much of it forged. 'A lot of it we made up,' he said. 'They would manufacture this feedback most of the time and present it to the owner … when a lot of the time, buyers wouldn't even be saying that.' By the time auction day came around, the former agent said, many sellers would accept less money, or be pleasantly surprised if they fetched more than initially hoped. Another former Melbourne agent said he was trained to encourage buyers attending early inspections to put in low bids, to scare the sellers into lowering their expectations. While some sellers had unrealistic expectations, the former agent said, this manipulation 'was just done in a very distasteful way' and wasn't always in the vendor's best interests. Being successful as an agent was about the volume of house sales, rather than achieving the highest prices for each property, he said. 'If you sell a house for an extra $50,000, but it takes you a few extra weeks to sell, it's not a substantial [increase to your commission], so it's just about moving it … I really didn't like that much, even more than the underquoting.' This was a fairly common industry practice, said Christopher, whose research firm monitors the auction market closely. 'It's called, 'buying the listing'.' Melbourne-based seller advocate Julie DeBondt-Barker recalls hearing a trainer discuss the practice in a session focused on ethics in the real estate industry in the early 2000s. Loading DeBondt-Barker said the trainer ran through a chapter on ethics, closed the book and candidly addressed the students: 'He said, 'All that's lovely, but guys, listen the reality out there is the biggest liar gets the listing',' she said. In practice, a real estate agent might secure a listing by assuring a vendor that their home is worth $1 million, when its real value is $900,000, and that they already have buyers looking for similar properties, DeBondt-Barker said. But when the ink dried on the sale authority, the agent would start 'conditioning down' expectations. 'They come back three days later and say, 'Actually, those buyers have purchased, and it's probably more like $950,000'.' The first lie Vendor conditioning can have devastating financial consequences for home owners who have banked on their agent's assurances their home will probably sell for more than it's worth. Retirees Jan and Jim Edwards almost lost the deposit on a new apartment this year after relying on their agent's advice that their four-bedroom Newcastle home was worth between $1 million and $1.1 million. The Edwardses said that after listing the property, the agent pressured them to drop the price guide. By the time of the auction, the guide was reduced to $850,000, and the home passed in at $948,000. 'But we needed more than $1 million because we had already paid the deposit on a two-bedroom unit, and because we are retired, we don't work and we can't get a bank loan,' Jan Edwards said. The couple read about the auction of their Newcastle home in last weekend's launch of the Bidding Blind investigation when would-be buyer David Witherdin spoke of his attempts to buy their house on behalf of his parents. 'I was sorry for the gentleman who missed out on buying our home,' Jan said. 'He was so misled by the agent who thought she would pressure us into accepting $160,000 less than we were asking.' While Witherdin lost hundreds of dollars in wasted due diligence costs through his failed attempt to buy the property, Jan said she and Jim would have lost about $10,500 on their failure to sell given storage, marketing and other costs. The couple terminated their agency agreement, relisted the home with a new agent and sold it two weeks later for $1.07 million. Veteran Sydney agent Bill Malouf, who heads eastern suburbs agency Highland Property, said agents were increasingly buying listings. As stock has dwindled, the number of agents has increased, which has meant greater competition, Malouf said. 'So many agents are desperate to get the business and will say anything to secure it, even though they're meant to be protecting their clients' best interests,' he said. Louis Christopher credits the disconnect between what agents have promised and what vendors will accept as the predominant cause of stale listings on the market for months longer than expected. SQM Research found that in the year to May there were 7019 properties on the market for more than 180 days in Sydney, an increase of 29.5 per cent on the previous year. Likewise, in Melbourne there were 9614 properties still for sale in Melbourne after 180 days, a 15.8 per cent increase in stale listings. A slow sales campaign is not something agents want either. Seller advocate Bernadette Hayes said agents would rather sacrifice a higher result, and therefore commission, for a faster sale. The revenue stream for many agents is not about maximising their commission but maximising sales volume, especially for those who have to split their commission with the franchise head office, Hayes said. 'The more properties they list and sell, the more they make.' A Victorian government report on the state's property market, commissioned in 2022 but never released, contains recommendations to discourage agents lying to vendors to win listings, according to co-author Enzo Raimondo. Loading Raimondo, a former long-term head of the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, calls the practice ' overquoting '. 'It does occur, and it's time for it to be eradicated as much as possible … I think the first step is to release the report,' he said. NSW Fair Trading, meanwhile, is consulting on potential changes to rules governing price guides. Under pressure An agent's first lie is telling owners they can sell for more than their property is worth, said Chris De Celis, a long-time agent in Sydney's western suburbs. The lies that follow are the agent's attempts to crunch the seller on price and manufacture interest from buyers. Merryn Calear knows too well what can go wrong between the hope-filled start of a sale campaign and the reality a few months later. When she listed her Coogee home last year, she was told by Roger Wardy and his team at Ray White Touma Taylor that they would push for $4.2 million. Calear said to sweeten the deal, she was also told the agents would only charge her half price for the advertisements, on a short-term contract and all while they already had a buyer who wanted to buy on her street. A doctor, no less. 'It just all looked golden,' Calear said. She signed an agency agreement that stipulated a guide of $3.7 million to $4.07 million. 'Keep in mind this in (sic) an agreement [that] allows us to guide a price we feel is relevant to get to our goal price,' Wardy texted. It was a scenario he texted Calear that played out on another of his recent sales, a four-bedroom house on Wentworth Street Randwick: 'We started at $3.8m, reserve $4.5m and sold $5.3m.' According to Calear, Wardy said he could definitely achieve a sale price of at least $4 million. Wardy denies that, and said he advised a likely selling range of between $3.4 million and $3.64 million. And while Calear maintained she wouldn't sell for less than $4 million, buyers were given a guide of $3.7 million. Worse, she said: 'The only offers that came in were all around $3 million. The only offer in writing was for $2.98 million. 'That's a $1 million difference. And meanwhile we are still living there, so we had to stage it twice a week to look like it was a home without two kids and a dog living in it. It was such a palaver.' Calear said that as the campaign rolled on, she was advised to cancel the auction because there were only two parties. She said that a few weeks later, Wardy asked her to sign a new agreement with a guide of $3.2 million to $3.52 million given the broader market had started floundering. Throughout she maintained she would only sell for $4 million. A week before Wardy's agency agreement was due to expire, buyer's agent Matt Spooner found a Bronte couple willing to pay $3.5 million. Calear said she wanted to think about the offer over a weekend, but Wardy wasn't waiting. According to Calear, and Wardy's own texts, he told buyers the only reason she hadn't signed was because she was attending to her sick child in hospital. None of Calear's children were sick, nor in hospital. When Calear still hadn't signed the next day, he asked her not to stand outside the house in case the buyers saw her again because 'I told them you were in hospital with your kid'. Wardy's take on the incident differs to his texts. 'When I relayed this to the buyer, I said that given she wasn't responding to calls or messages, she may be attending to a serious issue, potentially even at the hospital. The intention was not to mislead but to retain the buyer's interest during a period of silence from the vendor.' Calear cancelled the agency agreement. 'I felt he was dragging me into something really dirty,' she said. A week later, Calear signed with a new agent, who sold the house a few weeks later for $3.5 million to a different buyer. The last Calear heard from Wardy was in an email in which he demanded a 2.2 per cent commission on the sale. He has not been paid.

‘Biggest liar gets the listing': The tricks some agents use to pressure home sellers
‘Biggest liar gets the listing': The tricks some agents use to pressure home sellers

The Age

time5 hours ago

  • The Age

‘Biggest liar gets the listing': The tricks some agents use to pressure home sellers

Tom Panos credits himself with being Australia's top real estate coach, so when he arrives at an agency for a private training session, agents take note. After all, his Real Estate Gym website has about 20,000 subscribers, who pay to learn the art of selling real estate – or what he dubs in one training video as the 'list, reduce, sell strategy'. It is a familiar scenario for many Australian home sellers, whether they know it or not. Panos describes it as 'vendor management', but it is easily confused with the more manipulative practice known as 'vendor conditioning' that is commonly derided in the industry. Vendor conditioning is a dirty, open secret in the property industry that is practised by many agents despite the fact they are being paid to act in the vendor's best interests. It's a process whereby an agent exaggerates or blatantly lies about a property's value to get the listing, only to start massaging the seller's expectations down once the agency agreement is signed. 'It's one of the more dubious tactics that are out there in the industry,' said Louis Christopher, managing director of SQM Research. Whether you call it vendor conditioning or management, few sellers imagine that's what they are signing up for when they welcome an agent into their home. Panos outlined his tips, later posted briefly as a video to social media and watermarked as part of his training website, in a session at the office of high-profile agent Josh Tesolin, whose licence was recently suspended for four months by NSW Fair Trading following an investigation by this masthead's Bidding Blind investigation. 'It all starts at the listing presentation. Trust me. That's where the process starts,' Panos instructed Tesolin and about half a dozen others. 'When you go to the listing, what you do is you win the listing, and you give them hope.' Then comes the 'set-to-sell meeting'. This is no time for small talk, Panos said. 'Go in early with the bad news. 'We need to realign the value of your property from initial expectations by 5 per cent because I'd rather be sitting with you next week negotiating offers than having no offers'.' Panos denies there is anything wrong with his strategy to shape vendor expectations, adding there's a difference between training agents to factor in emotional buyers who will pay more for a property, and training agents to effectively buy the listing with lies. Panos told this masthead the video was intended to train agents for handling tough markets, such as when interest rates rise, and related to a conversation held with vendors a week or so after the property was listed. Lies and 'distasteful' manipulation Whistleblowing agents and property insiders working across Melbourne and Sydney said the practice of deliberately manipulating vendors through lies and other dirty tactics, first by getting them to list their house with them and then convincing them to sell their property quickly, was 'common'. Two former Melbourne real estate agents, who spoke anonymously to detail practices at their previous workplaces, said sellers would also be 'harshly conditioned' to accept less money than they originally hoped, or to get a quick sale. In one technique, detailed by a former agent at a major real estate franchise, vendors were given a report containing negative buyer feedback, much of it forged. 'A lot of it we made up,' he said. 'They would manufacture this feedback most of the time and present it to the owner … when a lot of the time, buyers wouldn't even be saying that.' By the time auction day came around, the former agent said, many sellers would accept less money, or be pleasantly surprised if they fetched more than initially hoped. Another former Melbourne agent said he was trained to encourage buyers attending early inspections to put in low bids, to scare the sellers into lowering their expectations. While some sellers had unrealistic expectations, the former agent said, this manipulation 'was just done in a very distasteful way' and wasn't always in the vendor's best interests. Being successful as an agent was about the volume of house sales, rather than achieving the highest prices for each property, he said. 'If you sell a house for an extra $50,000, but it takes you a few extra weeks to sell, it's not a substantial [increase to your commission], so it's just about moving it … I really didn't like that much, even more than the underquoting.' This was a fairly common industry practice, said Christopher, whose research firm monitors the auction market closely. 'It's called, 'buying the listing'.' Melbourne-based seller advocate Julie DeBondt-Barker recalls hearing a trainer discuss the practice in a session focused on ethics in the real estate industry in the early 2000s. Loading DeBondt-Barker said the trainer ran through a chapter on ethics, closed the book and candidly addressed the students: 'He said, 'All that's lovely, but guys, listen the reality out there is the biggest liar gets the listing',' she said. In practice, a real estate agent might secure a listing by assuring a vendor that their home is worth $1 million, when its real value is $900,000, and that they already have buyers looking for similar properties, DeBondt-Barker said. But when the ink dried on the sale authority, the agent would start 'conditioning down' expectations. 'They come back three days later and say, 'Actually, those buyers have purchased, and it's probably more like $950,000'.' The first lie Vendor conditioning can have devastating financial consequences for home owners who have banked on their agent's assurances their home will probably sell for more than it's worth. Retirees Jan and Jim Edwards almost lost the deposit on a new apartment this year after relying on their agent's advice that their four-bedroom Newcastle home was worth between $1 million and $1.1 million. The Edwardses said that after listing the property, the agent pressured them to drop the price guide. By the time of the auction, the guide was reduced to $850,000, and the home passed in at $948,000. 'But we needed more than $1 million because we had already paid the deposit on a two-bedroom unit, and because we are retired, we don't work and we can't get a bank loan,' Jan Edwards said. The couple read about the auction of their Newcastle home in last weekend's launch of the Bidding Blind investigation when would-be buyer David Witherdin spoke of his attempts to buy their house on behalf of his parents. 'I was sorry for the gentleman who missed out on buying our home,' Jan said. 'He was so misled by the agent who thought she would pressure us into accepting $160,000 less than we were asking.' While Witherdin lost hundreds of dollars in wasted due diligence costs through his failed attempt to buy the property, Jan said she and Jim would have lost about $10,500 on their failure to sell given storage, marketing and other costs. The couple terminated their agency agreement, relisted the home with a new agent and sold it two weeks later for $1.07 million. Veteran Sydney agent Bill Malouf, who heads eastern suburbs agency Highland Property, said agents were increasingly buying listings. As stock has dwindled, the number of agents has increased, which has meant greater competition, Malouf said. 'So many agents are desperate to get the business and will say anything to secure it, even though they're meant to be protecting their clients' best interests,' he said. Louis Christopher credits the disconnect between what agents have promised and what vendors will accept as the predominant cause of stale listings on the market for months longer than expected. SQM Research found that in the year to May there were 7019 properties on the market for more than 180 days in Sydney, an increase of 29.5 per cent on the previous year. Likewise, in Melbourne there were 9614 properties still for sale in Melbourne after 180 days, a 15.8 per cent increase in stale listings. A slow sales campaign is not something agents want either. Seller advocate Bernadette Hayes said agents would rather sacrifice a higher result, and therefore commission, for a faster sale. The revenue stream for many agents is not about maximising their commission but maximising sales volume, especially for those who have to split their commission with the franchise head office, Hayes said. 'The more properties they list and sell, the more they make.' A Victorian government report on the state's property market, commissioned in 2022 but never released, contains recommendations to discourage agents lying to vendors to win listings, according to co-author Enzo Raimondo. Loading Raimondo, a former long-term head of the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, calls the practice ' overquoting '. 'It does occur, and it's time for it to be eradicated as much as possible … I think the first step is to release the report,' he said. NSW Fair Trading, meanwhile, is consulting on potential changes to rules governing price guides. Under pressure An agent's first lie is telling owners they can sell for more than their property is worth, said Chris De Celis, a long-time agent in Sydney's western suburbs. The lies that follow are the agent's attempts to crunch the seller on price and manufacture interest from buyers. Merryn Calear knows too well what can go wrong between the hope-filled start of a sale campaign and the reality a few months later. When she listed her Coogee home last year, she was told by Roger Wardy and his team at Ray White Touma Taylor that they would push for $4.2 million. Calear said to sweeten the deal, she was also told the agents would only charge her half price for the advertisements, on a short-term contract and all while they already had a buyer who wanted to buy on her street. A doctor, no less. 'It just all looked golden,' Calear said. She signed an agency agreement that stipulated a guide of $3.7 million to $4.07 million. 'Keep in mind this in (sic) an agreement [that] allows us to guide a price we feel is relevant to get to our goal price,' Wardy texted. It was a scenario he texted Calear that played out on another of his recent sales, a four-bedroom house on Wentworth Street Randwick: 'We started at $3.8m, reserve $4.5m and sold $5.3m.' According to Calear, Wardy said he could definitely achieve a sale price of at least $4 million. Wardy denies that, and said he advised a likely selling range of between $3.4 million and $3.64 million. And while Calear maintained she wouldn't sell for less than $4 million, buyers were given a guide of $3.7 million. Worse, she said: 'The only offers that came in were all around $3 million. The only offer in writing was for $2.98 million. 'That's a $1 million difference. And meanwhile we are still living there, so we had to stage it twice a week to look like it was a home without two kids and a dog living in it. It was such a palaver.' Calear said that as the campaign rolled on, she was advised to cancel the auction because there were only two parties. She said that a few weeks later, Wardy asked her to sign a new agreement with a guide of $3.2 million to $3.52 million given the broader market had started floundering. Throughout she maintained she would only sell for $4 million. A week before Wardy's agency agreement was due to expire, buyer's agent Matt Spooner found a Bronte couple willing to pay $3.5 million. Calear said she wanted to think about the offer over a weekend, but Wardy wasn't waiting. According to Calear, and Wardy's own texts, he told buyers the only reason she hadn't signed was because she was attending to her sick child in hospital. None of Calear's children were sick, nor in hospital. When Calear still hadn't signed the next day, he asked her not to stand outside the house in case the buyers saw her again because 'I told them you were in hospital with your kid'. Wardy's take on the incident differs to his texts. 'When I relayed this to the buyer, I said that given she wasn't responding to calls or messages, she may be attending to a serious issue, potentially even at the hospital. The intention was not to mislead but to retain the buyer's interest during a period of silence from the vendor.' Calear cancelled the agency agreement. 'I felt he was dragging me into something really dirty,' she said. A week later, Calear signed with a new agent, who sold the house a few weeks later for $3.5 million to a different buyer. The last Calear heard from Wardy was in an email in which he demanded a 2.2 per cent commission on the sale. He has not been paid.

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