Why Some Listings Get 10x the Enquiries at the Same Price

Two listings. Same suburb. Same price bracket. One gets buried in enquiries. The other gets three calls in a slow week.

Agents usually blame the market. Sometimes they blame the price. Rarely do they look at the one variable that's actually within their control: how the listing presents.

That's the uncomfortable part. If price and location are equal, the gap has to come from somewhere else. And REA's own data just told us where.

The Real Variable Nobody's Measuring

Most agents track two numbers: days on market and final sale price. Almost nobody tracks enquiry rate against listing quality, because there's never been a clean way to isolate it.

REA Group recently changed that. Its PropTrack Buyer Impact Model, independently validated by Deloitte, analysed more than 1.3 million Australian property sales between August 2023 and November 2025. The finding that made headlines: buyer engagement was recorded on 9 in 10 properties that went on to sell (Elite Agent + 2).

That's not surprising on its own. What's more interesting is what the model actually measures to get there.

Buyer engagement was recorded on 9 in 10 properties that went on to sell, tracked across 25 distinct behavioural signals including immersive content engagement, image views, saves, shares and agent contact reveals.

Nine in ten sold listings had engagement. So the real question for the one listing that doesn't get enquiries isn't "is anyone looking at property in this suburb." They are. The question is why they're scrolling past yours and stopping on the one three doors down.

Why This Matters Right Now

Buyers move faster than they used to. They're triaging a portal feed on a five-inch screen, deciding in seconds whether a listing is worth a proper look. Static photos with flat lighting and no narrative don't survive that filter the way they did five years ago.

REA's model captures this directly. It tracks image engagement, saves, and shares as signals of genuine interest, not just clicks. A listing that gives a buyer a reason to linger, to save it, to send it to a partner, is a listing that's doing more than showing rooms. It's building a case for the property before the buyer ever picks up the phone.

Two agents can list at the identical price in the identical postcode and get radically different outcomes, because one listing is competing for attention and the other is just occupying a slot in the feed.

What Smarter Agents Are Doing Differently

Imagine you've just won two listings on the same street. Same era, same layout, comparable finish. One goes out with twelve flat photos and a generic description. The other opens with a narrated walkthrough that moves through the home the way a buyer would want to experience it in person: kitchen, living space, the light in the main bedroom, the backyard.

The second listing isn't more expensive to produce. It's just built with the buyer's actual decision-making process in mind, rather than a checklist of required photos.

This is where tools like PropertyVideos.ai come in. Agents are increasingly turning listing photos directly into branded, narrated video, without booking a videographer or waiting days for a turnaround, because the presentation gap has become the differentiator that price and location can't explain away.

Most agents are still treating the listing as a formality. It's actually the single highest-leverage piece of marketing they control.

How to Close the Gap on Your Next Listing

1. Audit your last three listings against a genuine competitor, not just your own history.
Pull up a comparable listing in the same suburb and price bracket. Look at it the way a buyer would: thumbnail first, then the first three images, then whether there's any video or motion at all.

2. Lead with the story, not the spec sheet.
Buyers decide emotionally first and justify it with facts. A narrated walkthrough that opens on the best feature of the home, rather than the driveway, holds attention longer.

3. Give buyers a reason to save and share, not just view.
Saves and shares are part of what REA's model actually tracks as engagement. A listing built to be forwarded to a partner or a parent performs differently to one that's only built to be scrolled past.

4. Treat video as standard inventory, not an upsell.
If it's not adding meaningful time or cost, there's no reason the identical-priced listing down the street should out-present yours.

Common Questions

Doesn't this just come down to the property itself?

No. REA's own methodology excludes unsold listings from the engagement comparison entirely, which means the model is measuring how buyers respond to properties that are, by definition, sellable. The variable left standing is how each one is presented.

Isn't video just for luxury listings?

No. The gap this data describes shows up hardest in the mid-market, where price and location genuinely are comparable and presentation is the only lever left to pull.

Won't this look like every other listing video?

Only if it's built like every other listing video. Narration, pacing and a real sense of place are what separate a walkthrough that gets saved from one that gets scrolled past.

The Bottom Line

Price and suburb explain a lot in real estate. They don't explain everything, and REA's own data just confirmed it. Nine in ten sold listings had real buyer engagement, which means the listings that don't get enquiries aren't failing because buyers aren't out there looking.

They're failing because nothing about the listing gave a buyer a reason to stop scrolling.

The agents pulling ten times the enquiries on an identical price and postcode aren't doing anything mysterious. They've just stopped treating the listing as a formality and started treating it as the actual sales pitch it always was.