Almost everyone who sells property in Bali has forgotten the one experience that would make them better at it. They have forgotten what it feels like to be the buyer. The island now carries a volume of inventory no single person can hold in their head. Independent platforms tracking the market log well over 100,000 property records across more than sixty locations, from Canggu to the Bukit to the quieter north, and every one of them needs a buyer. Most of the people paid to find that buyer have never stood where the buyer stands, with the money committed and the nagging question of whether the figures they were shown will survive contact with reality.
The Buyer We All Used to Be
Everyone in this industry started on the other side of the table. Before the first listing, the first commission, the first closing, most of us bought something ourselves. A first home, a plot of land, an early investment that kept us awake at night. We remember the uncertainty of it. Then the market slowly trains that memory out of us. Agents learn the craft of selling villas and land, and they become fluent in the pitch, the render, the projection. Very few have ever bought a villa themselves, funded a build, chased a permit that stalled for months, or discovered after handover that the rental figure they trusted was a hope dressed up as a record. The empathy gap is not a question of character. It is experiential. You cannot properly weigh a risk you have never had to carry yourself.
Why We Changed Sides
We know this because we were once on the other side of it too. Fullers began as a small agency that listed properties and represented buyers at the same time, and we felt the pull that every agent in that position feels. The quiet temptation to steer a client toward the property that paid us best rather than the one that served them best. We are not going to pretend that felt uncomfortable at the time, because it did not. That is precisely why we stopped. We became a buyer’s agency because the only honest way to remove the conflict was to remove the seller’s cheque from our side of the table entirely.
That single decision changed the questions we ask. Not “how do we close this,” but “should this person buy at all, and if so, on what terms.” It meant learning to assemble the right legal and tax team around a purchase rather than leaning on a notary alone. A notary confirms a signature and a title, and that work matters. Even the best notary is not engaged to tell you whether a lease structure will hold up when the extension falls due, whether the rental licence matches the zone, or whether the tax treatment on your income will quietly erase the yield you were promised. A few notaries are genuinely expert on these questions, but they are the exception, and none of it is the work they were hired to do. Those questions belong to other specialists: a property lawyer, a tax consultant, an investment advisor, each answering the part that is theirs. You would not ask a doctor to fix the plumbing. A buyer who does not know which question belongs to whom is exposed long before anyone signs.
What the Best Developers Already Understand
The best developers on the island have already made this shift, and it shows in how their projects perform. They price to what the market can genuinely return, not to the margin they would like to extract. They lead with real numbers instead of optimistic projections. They design villas that are comfortable to live in and simple to operate, with a concept and a location that hold value rather than chase a trend. They put the permits and the licences in place before they sell, not after the buyers start asking. They partner with a management company that has a record of protecting owner returns rather than one that merely fills a calendar. Underneath all of it sits a single decision. They thought about the buyer. They thought about the foreign investor sitting in Sydney or Singapore who cannot fly over every month, and they built for that person’s peace of mind. Those are the projects that sell out quietly and resell well.
The rest are still selling a render and a dream. Beautiful imagery, a confident projection, and a price reverse engineered from the developer’s desired profit rather than any honest study of what the buyer can earn at that number. The building itself may even be good. The problem is the arithmetic. When the asking price is built backwards from the developer’s margin instead of forwards from the buyer’s return, someone has to absorb the difference, and it is always the buyer.
The Gravity of the Commission
For agents, consultants and investment advisors, the work is ultimately about creating wealth and being paid for it. There is nothing wrong with that. The difficulty is that the market trains professionals to think from the seller’s side rather than the buyer’s. Competition for attention is fierce, and a developer or seller fighting to be noticed among thousands of other properties offers the most attractive commission and the richest bonus. The rational professional drifts toward the product that pays best. That is not villainy. It is gravity. It is ordinary human behaviour under a pay structure that rewards volume and rewards the wrong loyalty. We understand it completely, because for a while we lived inside it.
The Part of the Market We Cannot Change
Here is the part worth being honest about. We cannot change the market, and we should stop pretending we want to. A developer who builds a product has every right to fight the competition and sell it quickly. A seller who holds out for the best price is behaving exactly as a seller should. Those incentives are valid, and they are not going anywhere. What can change is where a professional chooses to place their attention. Move it away from the by product of the work, the money, the commission, the question of how we get paid, and put it back on the thing that generates the money in the first place. A developer is paid because a buyer fell in love with a place and the numbers held up. An agent is paid because they found someone who loved a property and could stand behind its price with a clear conscience. The income is a consequence of value, never a substitute for it.
The Family Test
So the permanent fix is not a new regulation or a clever new framework. It is a question any honest person in this industry can ask before recommending anything at all. Would I put my own money into this, at this price, on these terms? Would I put my family into it? If the answer is no, nothing else about the pitch matters. That single test quietly reorganises everything: the price you are willing to stand behind, the projections you are willing to repeat, the properties you are willing to place in front of someone who trusted you. It is the reason we screen every property against title, permits, zoning, rental viability and exit before it reaches a client. It is simply the standard we would want applied to us if the roles were reversed.
That is where I want to leave this, with a question rather than a conclusion, because the answer says more about our industry than any market report could. If you would not buy the property yourself, at the price you are asking, why are you asking someone else to? And if you are the buyer, the next time an agent walks you through a villa, ask them that to their face. Then watch closely what the answer tells you.
