The Get Rich Slow Scheme at Robertson Real Estate
While auction rooms empty out down south, John Caruso learns why the Hinterland hasn’t followed, and why plain honesty is still the better business model.
There’s a lot of hush in the property market now, most of it coming from Sydney and Melbourne, where auctions that once ran fifteen sales a Saturday are down to one, often with no registered bidders. Add changes to negative gearing, capital gains tax, and a new ban on self-managed super funds borrowing to buy residential property, and it’s easy to understand why plenty of homeowners, landlords, and would-be buyers locally are watching the headlines and assuming the worst is coming for them too.
It isn’t, or at least not in the shape the headlines suggest. Across the Noosa Hinterland and Gympie there’s a shortage of housing stock, tradespeople are being pulled toward infrastructure ahead of the 2032 Olympics rather than new builds, and interstate migration hasn’t slowed in any way that shows
up in the numbers.
Different market, different pressures, and none of it captured by a story written about a different city. But knowing that requires someone who understands this market rather than one being reported from across the state border, and that’s where Jason Robertson comes in.
I’ve sat across from Jason many times, on subjects that have ranged well beyond real estate. We’ve talked business, we’ve talked family. I’ve written about his other project, Luxgym, before, and what’s struck me each time is Jason’s directness. He’s someone who’s genuinely invested in the people he deals with, and a family man in the way that matters. His father still texts and calls with unsolicited advice, and Jason still picks up.
None of that is the sort of thing you can put in a listing brochure, but it’s the reason I keep coming back to Jason whenever the conversation turns to what’s happening locally, rather than what a headline writer in another state assumes must be happening.
That directness is the whole point of what follows, because the property market doesn’t need another prediction. It needs someone who’s honest about what he doesn’t know and confident about what he does. Start with the cycle itself, because Jason doesn’t dress it up as anything other than what it is.
“Ninety per cent of the things you worry about never come to pass anyway, and we have no control over any of it,” he says. “It’s about sticking with your strategy and understanding the cycles.”
He’s run more than one business through more than one downturn, and the pattern he’s noticed applies as much to real estate as it did to his electrical business or his gym.
“We’re bound to get more houses to sell and more buyers. It’ll just happen if you hang around long enough,” he says.
That’s not passivity, and it’s not spin either. It’s a director who’s watched enough booms and busts to know they’re not events; they’re weather.
“We’re comfortable working within an unpredictable market. There are ebbs and flows,” he says. “You could have a couple of years where things just keep going up and up, and now things are changing to some degree, and we’re comfortable and agile enough to work with that.”
Plenty of agents talk a good game when prices are rising. Fewer have anything useful to say when they’re not, and fewer have anything useful to say to a seller, a buyer, and a landlord weighing up whether to hold or sell an investment property, all in the same week.
What Jason won’t do is the part worth dwelling on, because it’s rarer than it should be in this industry.
“We’ve never been an agency that tells people untruths about their property value when we know we’re going to have to correct that down the track,” he says.
Real appraisals, not hopeful ones. It’s cost him listings, and he knows it, but the number a client walks away with is one they can plan a life around rather than one they’ll be talked down from two months later, after the market has had its say. He traces the habit back to his years as an electrician, which is a detail I like more than most, because it says something true about a person that doesn’t show up in a company bio.
“As a sparky, I always quoted for everything,” he said. “That meant sometimes I lost the job. But what I haven’t done is deliberately leave things out that I know the client’s going to need and then hit them with a whole lot of variations later.”
Swap wiring for a property valuation and the logic holds. The agents who inflate an appraisal to win the listing are running the same trick as the tradesman who lowballs the quote to win the job, and Jason has had no patience for that game in either trade.
“It’s the cost of integrity and doing the right thing. I’d rather be able to sleep at night,” he says.
It’s why the business he’s built doesn’t chase the fastest transaction. Jason is candid that the actual goal is the client who comes back next time and sends their family and friends along with them.
Building that kind of trust takes considerably longer than closing a single sale. It’s also the same instinct that shaped a line he came by honestly rather than learned from a seminar. His father still messages him warnings about get-rich-quick schemes, a habit that has followed Jason well into adulthood and several successful businesses of his own.
“I’m on the get rich slow scheme,” Jason tells me, laughing. “And I think my Dad needs some new friends.”
I’ve heard plenty of agents describe themselves as honest. I’ve sat with fewer who could back it up and fewer still who’d let their own father’s scepticism become part of the pitch. That’s the difference between a marketing line and an actual character trait, and it’s the reason I’d trust Jason with my own place, headlines or no headlines. The market will do what markets do. Boom, correction, boom again – on a timeline nobody can predict with any real precision.
What you can predict, if you’ve spent enough time in the room with him, is whether the person advising you through it is telling you the truth or telling you what you want to hear. Across the Noosa Hinterland and Gympie right now, that’s the only prediction worth making, and Jason Robertson is the reason I’m comfortable making it.
