Getting Your Team Wrong: The Mistake That Costs More Than Stamp Duty | NAPP Podcast S02E03

Stamp duty gets the blame for being the biggest cost of buying a home. Fair enough, it is a brutal number. This episode of Not Another Property Podcast argues there is a bigger one, and it never shows up on an invoice: getting your team wrong. Or, more often, buying with no team at all.

Host Gianni Musumeci of Leverage Property Advisers puts it to a panel that is, conveniently, the team in question: Daniella Muzitano (Executive Director and Co-Founder, Titlespace), Mark Horvat (principal buyer’s agent, The Acquiry), Andrew Chan (Certified Financial Planner, Phoenix Private Wealth Management) and George Koletti (accountant, Access Professionals).

In 19 minutes, each of them describes what goes wrong when their chair is empty: the signature a conveyancer can’t undo, the search that drags because nobody is driving it, the “should you” question nobody asked before the bank said yes, and the pool the title had already vetoed. General information only, and the opinions are the guests’ own. Advice about your own purchase comes from your own team, which is rather the point.

• 0.25% of the purchase price is forfeited if you use the NSW cooling-off period to withdraw
• 1 to 2% a month: the market growth Mark Horvat says Sydney has seen for stretches of recent years (his figure)
• 10% more for the same house six months later in that kind of market, on Mark Horvat’s maths (his figure, not ours)

In this episode

• The conveyancer’s chair: the one decision nobody can fix after the fact, signing a contract that nobody has read
• Why a contract is never standard, and what easements and covenants on the title can do to a backyard plan
• The buyer’s agent’s chair: what changes about the pace of a search, and Mark Horvat’s two costs of delay
• Why buyers who have missed out for months tend to overpay on the next one
• The planner’s chair: Andrew Chan’s rule that “should you” comes before “can you”, and the life questions behind it
• The accountant’s chair: a home versus an investment, and why George Koletti will not act until the rest of the team has looked
• Due diligence for the life you will have: schools, transport, zoning, the planning certificate, council and strata by-laws

Who sits where on the team

Key takeaways from the episode

1. The empty conveyancer chair: signing before anyone has read the contract

Gianni opens with the question every conveyancer has an answer ready for. What do buyers do, before they have spoken to anyone, that can’t be fixed later? Daniella’s answer is the obvious one, and it still happens every weekend. They sign. The contract from Saturday’s auction lands on her desk on Monday, and by then the time to change anything has gone.

Buyers treat contracts as standard forms. They’re not. The special conditions change from contract to contract, and the title can carry easements or covenants that decide what you can build. Daniella’s example: you buy for the backyard, you have already picked the pool tiles, and an easement runs through the exact spot.

The fix is the order you do things in. Make your offer through the agent and sign nothing. Once the offer is accepted, the contract goes to your conveyancer before you sign, so anything that favours the seller is negotiated first. At auction the review comes before you register to bid, because the contract is exchanged on the day. Daniella gives the same instruction even when a cooling-off period applies: the contract comes in first, and the cooling-off period is for inspections and finance, not for reading the contract for the first time.

Pulling out during cooling off isn’t free either. If you use it, you forfeit 0.25 per cent of the purchase price. On a Sydney price, that is an expensive change of heart.

2. The empty buyer’s agent chair: a search with nobody driving

Gianni’s next question is about pace. What changes when a buyer’s agent is in the room? Mark’s answer is one word, and he uses it a lot. Momentum. Every search has setbacks, and buyers on their own take a while to get back up after each one. With someone driving, the search doesn’t stall, nothing gets postponed, and there is a voice saying “next one” before you have finished sulking.

Then he puts a number on waiting, and it is his number, not ours. In a market growing by 1 or 2 per cent a month, which he says Sydney has managed for stretches of recent years, buying six months later can mean paying around 10 per cent more for something you could have had at the start. His job, as he describes it, is getting a buyer to a decision as fast as they can sensibly make one.

The second cost has no spreadsheet. Six months of missed Saturday sport, family events skipped for open homes, and every dinner turning into a property conversation. Mark calls moving faster an unrealised value add. Translation: nobody budgets for their weekends until they have lost a winter of them.

3. What the empty chairs cost at the end: tired buyers overpay

Gianni describes the buyer most of us have been. Three to six months in, missed out again, and finally saying whatever comes next, I’ll just pay it. Mark says that is exactly how so many buyers end up overpaying. Not because they don’t know what they’re doing, but because they badly want it to be over.

They have missed before, maybe because they didn’t go as hard as they should have, so the next one gets bought on fatigue instead of judgement. He calls it sad. Hard to argue. A purchase that should be a milestone becomes a chore to get through, like the last 20 minutes at Ikea.

The antidote, in his telling, is having someone in your corner when the plan changes. Someone to call the pivot, give the pep talk and line up the next option, so months of ups and downs aren’t carried alone.

4. The empty planner chair: “should you” comes before “can you”

Andrew starts with where most property advice comes from: mum, dad, an uncle at a barbecue, all generous with wisdom from a property market that no longer exists. Their advice usually boils down to, do it because you can. His answer is the line of the episode. The question isn’t whether you can. It’s whether you should, and should comes first.

“Should you” means the rest of your life. The standard of living you want. Whether gearing up means you stop seeing your friends. The school you want for your kids. Whether aged care, for you or your parents, is somewhere on the horizon. He works through those before anyone looks at a borrowing figure.

His stories will sound familiar. The couple who fell for a house straight off a holiday. The client who bought in the holiday town and forgot the family lived somewhere else. The family who bought on two incomes while expecting a second child and never modelled one income and a redundancy. His point isn’t that those purchases were wrong. It’s that nobody said the scenarios out loud, and saying them out loud is the planner’s job on the team.

He also draws the line between a home and an investment. A home is about whether you can hold it comfortably through rate rises and job changes; timing matters less than people think. An investment is clinical: numbers, buffers, the tax position, and no emotion at all. All of it general, and he says so himself.

5. The empty accountant chair: emotion in an investment, and a team nobody consulted

George agrees with Andrew and adds the accountant’s lens. If you’re buying a place to live in, you’re buying it for the area and the kind of home it is, and in his experience the tax side rarely comes up: it is your principal place of residence, and unless something materially changes, you’re fine on that front. What matters is cash flow, and he picks up the same example, a family about to drop to one income with a second child on the way.

An investment property is a different conversation. His rule: take every bit of emotion out of it, because emotion is what delays the decision and then gets it wrong. Emotional decisions on an investment property are, in his words, the worst possible thing you could do. Falling in love with the kitchen is allowed. Falling in love with the yield is not a thing.

His other rule is about the team itself, and it is the one the episode is named for. He won’t act for a client on a purchase until the rest of the team has looked at it: the contract read, the reasons for buying tested by someone like Mark, the numbers in order. That is his practice and his view, not tax advice for anyone listening.

6. Due diligence for the life you’ll have, not the one you have today

Mark’s most common due diligence miss isn’t legal, it’s personal. Buyers judge a property against their life today, not the one they’ll be living in a few years: schools, transport, parks, how the layout copes with another child. Sydney changes suburb by suburb, so he pushes clients to think five and 15 years out. His example is the family who could have bought within walking distance of the school and instead spends 15 years doing the drop-off from the car.

Then the renovation question. Buyers underestimate the cost and the difficulty of the extra room, the second storey or the granny flat for the parents, and once they move in, life, bills and the Bunnings run get in the way. His advice is to speak to the right people before you commit, get clear on what is possible and what it costs, and do it quickly, because the best outcomes go to buyers who know what they want.

Daniella’s side of that conversation is the legal checklist, the part of due diligence when buying a house that happens on paper before anyone books an inspection. First, the title, for easements or covenants. Then what the client actually wants to do, read against the planning certificate, and a call to council. For a unit, the strata by-laws, which she goes through with clients to see what has been done and what can be. Her closing line is the simplest version of the whole episode: tell your conveyancer what you plan to do with the place, and ask them to check the contract for it. That is what the chair is for.

Getting the legal side right

Four professionals, one short episode, and the part that lands on our desk is the order of events. Our conveyancing for buyers page has the whole process. This is the bit buyers get backwards, usually with the best intentions and a Saturday deadline.

The order that works: make your offer through the agent and sign nothing. Once the offer is accepted, send the contract to us and don’t sign until it has been reviewed. Engage us before you start making offers and we’re ready to move the moment the agent says yes. Our guide to how to make an offer on a house, which Mark contributed to, walks through the private treaty version. At auction the contract is exchanged on the day with no cooling off, so the review, the finance and the inspections all have to happen before you bid. Our list of the mistakes buyers make at auction starts there.

Why the fuss about one signature? Exchange of contracts is when the contract becomes binding and the deposit is paid. Buy an established home by private treaty and you usually get five business days to change your mind. If you use it, you forfeit 0.25 per cent of the purchase price. There is no cooling-off period if you buy at auction, if you exchange on the same day the property was passed in, or if you have given a section 66W certificate. Our post on the cooling-off period in NSW has the detail. The short version: five business days is a safety net. It will not cover finance, a building and pest report and a strata search read properly, and it was never meant to.

What the review looks for, which is also the list Daniella works through when a client says they want a pool, a granny flat or the in-laws downstairs:

1. Special conditions that may not work in your favour
2. Building and pest clauses that are vague or too narrow
3. Settlement terms that could cause delays or cost blowouts
4. Cooling-off rights, whether they apply and how they are worded
5. Easements or zoning restrictions that could affect future plans
6. The planning certificate and, for a unit, the strata records. Our guide to strata, Torrens and off the plan title explains why the title type changes the checks

We review your contract within two business days of receiving it, and often the same day. If you want to know what you’re reading, our guide to what goes in a NSW contract for sale covers the planning certificate and the rest of the pack, and first timers can start with what first home buyers get wrong. In NSW, both licensed conveyancers and solicitors can run your matter from start to finish, and we have both. We just don’t do disputes. Titlespace is a conveyancing law firm based in Sydney, acting on purchases, sales and transfers in NSW, VIC, QLD and the ACT. If you’re buying in Sydney, our conveyancer in Sydney page covers the local version, and the conveyancing in NSW hub covers the rest of the state.

Meet the Experts

• Gianni Musumeci (host): investment advisor and founder of Leverage Property Advisers, focused on property investment strategy. LinkedIn
• Daniella Muzitano: Executive Director and Co-Founder of Titlespace, a conveyancing law firm based in Sydney. LinkedIn
• Mark Horvat: principal buyer’s agent at The Acquiry. LinkedIn
• Andrew Chan: Certified Financial Planner and founder of Phoenix Private Wealth Management. LinkedIn
• George Koletti: accountant at Access Professionals. LinkedIn

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More from Not Another Property Podcast

• Would You Buy in Sydney Right Now, or Sit Out 2026? (S02E02)
• Buying Property With Family in Australia (S02E01)
• How to Sell Your Property Without Losing Sleep (Ep 5)

The content of this blog post is intended as general information and should be considered broad guidance only. It does not constitute legal, financial or tax advice and should not be relied upon as such. The views expressed by guests are their own, were given at the time of recording and are general and factual in nature. Every property transaction is different, and we recommend seeking personalised advice from a qualified professional before making any investment or legal decisions.