The commission cheques look great. The car is good. The agent of the year award is on the wall. The natural next step, every top agent eventually concludes, is to open their own agency. Be the principal. Build something with your name on the door.
What no one tells you - at least, not honestly - is that the business you’re walking into looks very different from the business you’ve been working in for the last decade. The skills that made you a top-performing agent are not the same skills that make you a successful principal. And the names you admire in the Queensland real estate industry - the people whose offices you compare yourself to - got there through tireless, often unglamorous work that the industry rarely talks about.
This piece is for the senior agents thinking about that next step. It’s a frank account of what changes the day you sign the lease and put your name on the door.
The first reality: you stop being paid to sell
When you’re a top agent in someone else’s office, your time is overwhelmingly spent on revenue-generating activity. Listing presentations, buyer calls, contract negotiations, open homes. Everything else is someone else’s problem. Marketing, admin, compliance, IT, HR, finance - these are infrastructure provided by the agency.
The day you become a principal, all of that becomes your problem. You’re now paying a property manager, an admin team, a bookkeeper, a marketing person, an IT support contractor, a recruiter, a trust accountant - and you’re paying for the office, the brand licence, the technology, the insurance, the training, the trust audit, the REIQ membership, and the office of fair trading licence.
Your time, which was 80% revenue-generating, is now 30-40% revenue-generating at best. The rest is operations.
The second reality: the math is different
Top agents often imagine the principal model as their personal commission, multiplied. It is not. Every dollar of commission earned by your agents has costs attached: the agent’s split, the office overhead allocation, the marketing contribution, the admin support, the trust accounting, the technology, the insurance.
After all of that, the principal’s residual on each agent’s deal is often in the 8-15% range - sometimes less in the early years when the office is sub-scale.
The way principals actually make money is through scale: enough agents, doing enough deals, with enough operational efficiency, to clear meaningful overheads and produce profit.
This takes time. Most QLD principals will tell you their first 24 months were break-even or worse, before the office found its rhythm.
The third reality: it’s a recruitment business
The most under-appreciated truth about being a real estate principal is that it’s primarily a recruitment business. Your single most important task - more important than listing the next $5m beachfront, more important than closing the next auction - is finding, attracting, training, and retaining the best agents in your market.
A great agent in your office is worth $200,000-$500,000 of profit per year. A bad agent costs you that much in opportunity cost, brand damage, and team morale.
The principals who build successful agencies in Queensland are obsessive recruiters. They take coffees they don’t need. They run mentoring programs. They build cultures where their best people don’t want to leave.
The names worth studying
If you want to understand what successful principal-led agencies look like in Queensland, study the people running them. None of these businesses became what they are by accident. Every one represents years of disciplined, often invisible work.
Michael Kollosche founded Kollosche on the Gold Coast in 2019 and built it into the prestige property leader of South-East Queensland. The agency now has more than 125 staff, multiple divisions, and consistently records the largest residential auction prices in the state. Michael is still an active selling principal - not just a CEO - and the standard of execution across the business reflects that.
Haesley Cush and Matt Lancashire lead the Ray White Collective in Brisbane, a group that includes Ray White New Farm, Bulimba, East Brisbane, Clayfield, Toowong, Spring Hill, Kim Olsen Property, and Woody Point - and was awarded Ray White’s number one international business. Haesley has called more than 10,000 auctions and started his career in 1996 working for his mother at Ray White Moorooka. Three decades of work to build that reputation. Matt too has decades of luxury property sales experience and is routinely rated as one of Queensland premiere luxury property agents.
Dane Atherton built what is now Coastal - the Gold Coast’s leading independent agency - across five offices and over 150 staff. After 13 years with Harcourts, he made the call to go independent in 2024 and rebrand. Coastal consistently sells more property than any other agency on the Gold Coast.
Jordan Strudwick founded STRUD Property in 2020 in Ipswich. Jordan came from a non-real-estate background, broke through as Newcomer of the Year nominee with Real Estate Business Australia, and built a top-performing agency in a regional market that many established names had overlooked. STRUD is one of the up-and-coming agencies that proves the principal model still works for new entrants who are willing to do the work. STRUD is also taking diversification to the next level, building a STRUD ecosystem that includes Strud Property, Strud Property Management, Strud Finance and Strud Marketing.
Santo and Giovanni Spinella run Ray White Townsville. The Spinella brothers have been business partners since 2015, won REIQ Regional Agency of the Year multiple times, and helped over 700 families find homes in 2022 alone. Townsville is historically a hard market – but the Spinellas built a dominant position by being relentlessly local, present and operationally consistent. They also own QRET – a real estate training organisation that specialises in licensing and CPD training.
Ainsley Driver runs McGrath Bundaberg (now McGrath Knight Frank Wide Bay & Fraser Coast). A former electrician turned real estate principal, he built a 6-star service business in a regional market, and is widely regarded as one of the best operators in the Wide Bay region.
Robbie Lofaro leads Place Purpose Group (PPG) - formerly Harcourts Connections - across Brisbane and the surrounding suburbs. The team is backed by Place Estate Agents (the most progressive real estate brand in Queensland), with decades of collective experience. From the outside looking in, PPG appears to be the fastest growing business group in the industry at present – with acquisitions and mergers of great talent into the PPG ecosystem happening almost monthly.
These businesses look different from each other. What they share is a principal - or a small leadership team - who has put in the disciplined operational work over years to build something that performs.
The fourth reality: compliance is non-negotiable now
The job of being a principal in 2026 is materially harder than the job of being a principal in 2016.
The Property Law Act 2023 has imposed disclosure obligations that didn’t exist a year ago.
Tranche 2 AML/CTF reforms hit on 1 July 2026 and bring real estate agents into AUSTRAC’s regulatory perimeter for the first time.
The REIQ continuing professional development regime is now mandatory.
Trust accounting standards continue to tighten.
Compliance isn’t an afterthought. It’s a core operational function. Principals who try to outsource it entirely to lawyers or admin teams without owning it personally have created a structural vulnerability in their business.
The principals named above all have one thing in common: they take compliance seriously, they invest in the systems that support it, and they personally understand their obligations.
The fifth reality: it’s a long game
Every principal we’ve worked with at SearchX tells a version of the same story. The first 18 months were harder than expected. The first agent they hired wasn’t the right one. The first office they opened needed renovation. The first year of trust accounting threw up surprises.
By year three, the rhythm is established. By year five, the business has its identity. By year ten, the business has the reputation that lets the principal start to step back from day-to-day selling.
This is not the kind of business that pays out in a quarter. It pays out in a decade.
What we’ve seen work
The Queensland principals who consistently build successful businesses tend to share a small number of habits.
They are present - in the office, on the phones, at the auction - long after they could have stepped back.
They invest in technology that scales. Manual processes don’t survive growth.
They recruit relentlessly and protect the culture that attracts good people.
They take compliance seriously and build it into the operating model from day one.
They treat their relationships - with vendors, with conveyancers, with brokers, with buyer’s agents, with their fellow principals - as long-term commercial assets.
They don’t pretend it’s easier than it is.
How SearchX supports principals
The reason SearchX exists is to take one of the most operationally complex parts of the real estate principal’s job - disclosure compliance - off the principal’s plate. Legally reviewed Form 2 disclosure statements in 24-72 hours. Audit trail maintained automatically. Body corporate, title, and council certificates sourced from official channels.
For principals at any stage - building their first office, expanding their second, or running a multi-office group - this is one piece of the operating model that should be solved infrastructure, not a daily fire.
If you’re thinking about the move from agent to principal, or about the next stage of growth in an existing principal-led business, we’d like to be a useful part of that conversation.
FAQS
Is being a real estate principal just earning more commission?
No. Every dollar of commission earned by your agents carries costs - the agent's split, office overhead, marketing, admin, trust accounting, technology and insurance. The principal's residual on each deal is often modest, sometimes less in the early years. Principals make money through scale and operational efficiency, not multiplied personal commission.
How long before a new agency becomes profitable?
Most Queensland principals say their first 24 months were break-even or worse before the office found its rhythm. By year three the rhythm is established, by year five the business has its identity, and by year ten the principal can start to step back. It is a long game, not a quarterly payout.
What is the most important skill for a principal?
Recruitment. The single most important task is finding, attracting, training and retaining the best agents in the market. A great agent represents significant profit; a poor one costs that much in opportunity cost, brand damage and team morale.
How has compliance changed the principal's job?
It is materially harder than a decade ago. The Property Law Act 2023 added disclosure obligations, Tranche 2 AML/CTF reforms bring agents into AUSTRAC's perimeter from 1 July 2026, the REIQ CPD regime is mandatory, and trust accounting standards keep tightening. Compliance is now a core operational function the principal must own personally, not fully outsource.
What do successful Queensland principals have in common?
They stay present in the business long after they could step back, invest in technology that scales, recruit relentlessly and protect their culture, take compliance seriously and build it into the operating model from day one, and treat relationships with vendors, conveyancers, brokers and other principals as long-term commercial assets.