By the measures a marketer is trained to celebrate, the agency was winning. It was younger and smaller than the household names it competed against, yet a striking number of property sellers knew exactly who it was. It had built that fame on something genuinely distinctive — marketing so polished it made the sale of a home feel cinematic. People remembered it. Asked their impression, they reached for the same word again and again: creative. That was the catch the headline numbers hid. Awareness was high, but conviction was thin. Most people who knew the agency held no real opinion of it — aware, even admiring, but undecided. They had watched. They had not chosen. For a brand that had spent years becoming known, the uncomfortable question was no longer how do we get noticed but why does being noticed not turn into being hired?

“We asked sellers to imagine a home worth around a million dollars, and gave them two arrangements. Pay a modest commission and sell it as it stands. Or pay roughly three times that commission for a service that would stage the home, film it, and market it widely — for a real chance at a meaningfully higher price and, after the larger fee, more money in their pocket. 68% chose to pay the higher commission.”

To answer it we surveyed 472 property owners across Singapore — experienced sellers and first-timers, everyone aged twenty-five and up — and benchmarked the agency against the major players the way a seller actually weighs them up. We asked the plain question first: when you choose someone to sell the largest asset you own, what actually matters?

Sellers ranked the practical things highest — a fair commission, proven experience with their particular kind of property, the ability to sell within a sensible time. Near the bottom of the list sat "a strong social-media presence." The very quality the agency was famous for was, in the abstract, the quality sellers said they cared about least.

Taken at face value, that points to an obvious conclusion: deemphasise the showmanship, emphasise the substance. But stated preferences can never be taken at face value. People do not always want what they say they want, and they almost never know what they will do until a real choice is in front of them. So we put one there.

We asked sellers to imagine a home worth around a million dollars, and gave them two arrangements. Pay a modest commission and sell it as it stands. Or pay roughly three times that commission for a service that would stage the home, film it, and market it widely — for a real chance at a meaningfully higher price and, after the larger fee, more money in their pocket. 68% chose to pay the higher commission.

That single result reorganised everything. The premium service was not the problem. Sellers wanted it — when it was framed as proceeds rather than as production. The same people who had ranked "creativity" near the bottom happily paid for it the moment it was attached to a number that ended up in their bank account. And the older sellers, the ones the agency's youthful brand had quietly failed to reach, chose the premium option just as readily as the young did. They had never been opposed to the model. They had simply never been shown the arithmetic.

The agency had been selling the show. Its sellers were buying the result. The creativity was real and worth paying for — but it had been presented as craft to be admired rather than as money to be made, and admiration, it turns out, does not sign a listing agreement. There was one more thing to handle with care, and it sat inside the agency's proudest line. We get you the highest price is intoxicating to a seller and nearly impossible to prove — and it carries a hidden cost. If a brand's entire story is that it always sells at the top, then to every buyer in the market a listing under that brand reads as overpriced. Today's buyer is tomorrow's seller. The promise that won the listing could quietly poison the next relationship. The stronger, safer story was never "highest price." It was "more money in your pocket — and here is exactly how," which has the rare virtue of being both provable and free of the sticky label.

The study did not tell the agency to be less creative. It told the agency what its creativity was for. Fame had proved that people were watching. The harder, more valuable thing was learning what would make them act — and then pointing all that craft, which the agency already had in abundance, squarely at it.