It’s Not the Legislation That’s Costing You the Deal – Real Estate Success Isn’t Just About Compliance
Every agent knows the drill: get your CPD hours in, stay across the legislation, keep your licence clean. It’s the baseline. But ask anyone who’s actually managed a real estate team what actually goes wrong day to day, and legislation is rarely the answer.
“A lot of the conflict I’ve seen in the real estate industry, and in fact across every other industry I have worked in, has nothing to do with compliance,” says Tarl Barnes, CPT’s Head of Operations. “It’s communication. A vendor who feels unheard. A buyer who feels rushed. An agent and a property manager who read a situation completely differently and end up butting heads over something that was never really about the transaction at all.”
Tarl comes from a background of people and performance management and coaching roles before moving into real estate operations — which puts her in an unusual position to see the pattern repeat. Whether it’s a team of agents, a principal and their PM, or an agent trying to bring a nervous vendor to the table, the friction points look the same: two people operating on different wavelengths, neither one adjusting to meet the other.
It’s the reason CPT went after approval for two new CPD sessions this year, both now signed off by the Office of Fair Trading and both sitting under the “Relationship management” category — a formal acknowledgment that this isn’t soft, optional stuff. It’s part of doing the job properly.
Two sessions, one underlying idea
The first, Understanding Yourself – Relationship Management, starts where it has to: with the agent. Attendees complete a personalised DISC profile and use it to unpack their own natural and adapted behavioural style — what drives them, what they need under pressure, how they’re likely to come across to a client who operates completely differently. It’s less a personality quiz and more a working document: communication do’s and don’ts, motivators, growth areas, something an agent can actually refer back to.
The second, DISC Leadership – Improving Communication and Relationship, takes that same framework and turns it outward. This one is about reading the other person — a client, a colleague, a vendor mid-negotiation — and adjusting to meet them, rather than expecting them to meet you. CPT’s built it around what it calls the Platinum Rule: not treating people the way you’d want to be treated, but the way they want to be treated. In an industry built on relationships with people you don’t get to choose, that distinction matters.
Why this, why now
None of this is new psychology — DISC has been around for decades. What’s changed is the willingness to treat it as a genuine professional development priority rather than a nice-to-have. Barnes puts it plainly: agents and PM’s can be completely across their legal obligations and still lose a deal, a client, or a good staff member because nobody in the conversation adjusted how they were communicating.
That’s the gap these two sessions are aimed at closing — not by adding more rules, but by giving agents &PM’s a practical way to understand themselves and read the room a little better.
Dates and enrolment details for both sessions will be announced shortly. In the meantime, keep an eye on CPT’s CPD calendar