Success Stories: Angela from South Stradbroke Island

Some properties just don’t fit the standard agent playbook.

Angela’s home sits on South Stradbroke Island, a 21-kilometre stretch of conservation park off the northern Gold Coast with no bridge and no road in. If you want to see the place, you get there the way the locals do: about ten minutes by boat from Runaway Bay Marina.

Two agents had a crack at selling it. Twelve months later, it still hadn’t sold.

So Angela took it on herself. She listed privately with PropertyNow on 6 June, and 26 days later the property was sold, to buyers who loved it enough to purchase it sight unseen.

To put those 26 days in perspective: South Stradbroke is one of the slowest-moving property markets in the country. CoreLogic counted just six house sales in the entire suburb in the twelve months to April 2026, and listing data puts the average time on market for an island house at around 600 days. On the mainland Gold Coast, a typical home sells in about 28 days.

Angela beat the mainland average with a property the island’s own numbers say should take the better part of two years.

We asked Angela about her experience, and she was refreshingly straight with us, including about the bits she found hard. Her answers are below, lightly edited for length.

“We’d got nowhere in 12 months”

Were you hesitant before trying private selling? What made you decide to give it a go?

“Yes, we were hesitant at first. We’d had the property listed with two different agents over 12 months and got nowhere, so we decided to give private selling a go ourselves.”

It’s a familiar starting point. Most of our sellers don’t arrive brimming with confidence. They arrive because the traditional route hasn’t delivered, and they figure nobody knows the property better than they do. In Angela’s case that was doubly true: an island home that’s only reachable by boat is exactly the kind of property a suburban agent struggles to present well.

When you sold, how did it feel?

“It felt good not having to hand over a huge chunk of the sale price in commission. Our property was unique, accessible only by boat, so standard agents really struggled to market it properly. Selling it ourselves suited the property.”

To put a rough number on that chunk: at a typical Queensland commission of around 2.5%, a sale like Angela’s would have handed an agent somewhere in the region of $45,000. Her PropertyNow listing cost a flat $979. That difference stays in the sellers’ pocket.

That last line is worth sitting with. The people best placed to explain a one-of-a-kind property (how the tides work, where the boat ties up, what a Sunday morning on the water actually feels like) are the people who live there. No agent script covers that.

What did the work

What services helped you most?

“The online listing and the signage board were the two things that helped us the most.”

No magic here, just the two workhorses of any private sale:

• The online listing put the property in front of buyers on the major portals, the same place agent listings appear. For an island home, that reach mattered more than anything: the eventual buyers committed without ever setting foot on the property.
• The signage board did the local legwork. Even somewhere boat-access-only, passing water traffic and neighbours talk.

If buyers can find a boat-access-only island property online and purchase it unseen, the portals are doing the heavy lifting they’re supposed to do, regardless of who created the listing.

The honest bit: what was hardest

What was the hardest part for you personally?

“The platform itself was a bit clunky and not that easy to navigate. We worked through it, but it took more time and patience than we expected.”

We asked for honest answers and Angela gave us one, so we’re not going to bury it. That feedback has gone straight to our product team. It’s exactly the kind of thing that shapes what gets fixed next.

Here’s the detail that struck us, though. Our team texted Angela the day after she signed up to offer a welcome call, and she said no thanks. When we checked with our helpdesk while putting this story together, there was no record of her ever contacting us for help. Not once. She found the platform fiddly in places, worked through it on her own terms, and sold a property two agents couldn’t, without a single support call. If that’s not “you’ve got this”, we don’t know what is.

(That said, the support team is there, seven days a week, licensed agents included. Most of our sellers do lean on them. Angela just happens to be built differently.)

If you could go back and give yourself advice before selling, what would it be?

“Hard to say. It was such a unique property that the buyers ended up purchasing it unseen. That’s not typical, so I’m not sure private selling would suit a standard property the same way.”

A fair caveat, honestly given. Here’s the thing, though: if anything, the logic runs the other way. Angela’s property was one of the hardest kinds to sell, and private selling still got it done in under a month after agents couldn’t in a year. A standard suburban home, with buyers who can actually drive past, is the easier version of the job. The rest of our success stories are mostly exactly that: ordinary homes in Rosewood, Riverton and Rosebery, sold by their owners.

The bottom line

Twelve months with two agents. Twenty-six days on her own.

Angela’s story isn’t that private selling is effortless. She’d be the first to tell you it took patience. It’s that an agent isn’t the ingredient that sells a property. The listing, the signboard, the price and the person who knows the place best do that. And on a sale like Angela’s, keeping roughly $45,000 that would otherwise have gone to commission is the reward for backing yourself.

If you’re weighing it up, start with our step-by-step guide to selling your home online, or see how selling privately works. And if you’re wondering what an agent would really cost you, we’ve written honestly about where commission money goes.

Thanks again to Angela for sharing her story, and her candour.

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By the PropertyNow team