Life as an agent on Kangaroo Island

For Michael Barrett, principal of Century 21 on Kangaroo Island, a day on the job is rarely without its surprises.

“The other day I went down to a place called Cape Hart, and I ran over a snake that was as long as the road,” recalled Mr Barrett. “You’ve got to have your wits about you.”

For city real estate agents, experiences like these would be something to write home about, but for Mr Barrett this is just part of day-to-day life. Born in Port Lincoln on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, Mr Barrett has called Kangaroo Island home for 35 years and has worked on the island’s real estate market for over two decades.

For the principal, it’s the authenticity of island life that has kept drawing him back.

“We’ve got no traffic lights, we’ve got no high-rise buildings, we’ve got untainted air,” Mr Barrett said. “It gives this opportunity for people to revisit their values and see what is important, and it creates a real stillness in their mind.”

For some visitors from the mainland, coming to Kangaroo Island is “a step back in time”, he said. “You almost feel the letdown of your worry when you live here.”

Located in the Gulf of St Vincent, just off the heel of South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula, Kangaroo Island is a 145-kilometre-long tapestry of scrubland, forests, wild sandy beaches and rain-lashed cliffs. In the language of the Kaurna people, custodians of the island for 16,000 years, Kangaroo Island is named Karta Pintingga, or “Island of the Dead”.

“People don’t realise how big Kangaroo Island is,” said Mr Barrett. “It’s nothing for me to do 200 to 300 kilometres a day, and a fair chunk of that time is on dirt roads. That’s why most of the agents run four-wheel drives with roo bars – we’re off the beaten track.”

The island has witnessed intense devastation over the last few years. During the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020, two-thirds of Kangaroo Island was burnt, and a staggering 80 per cent of the island’s koala population died in the fires. Two people on Kangaroo Island lost their lives.

“We couldn’t believe it,” said Mr Barrett. “There were lots of properties destroyed, homes destroyed, livestock destroyed.”

Now, however, the real estate industry is making a strong recovery. Mr Barrett said: “We’re starting to see the rebuilds starting to happen.”

“We’re at the stage now where a lot of farm homes are rebuilt, their infrastructure is new, their fencing is new – so there are a lot of fresh, and in some ways more comfortable farming properties than what there were before the bushfires.”

When it comes to Mr Barrett’s clientele, local farming families make up a sizeable proportion of vendors and buyers. With cheap land, a mild climate and some of the most reliable rainfall in South Australia, Kangaroo Island is “a bit a lifestyle region for mum and dad to farm around”.

According to Mr Barrett, older retirees have also been increasingly moving from farm properties to coastal towns like Kingscote.

When COVID-19 swept the island, legislation changes unlocked up to $40,000 for households – “$10,000 worth of super for mum, $10,000 for dad, and then at the end of the financial year, another 10 and another 10” – giving local farming households the deposit for a $250,000 to $300,000 home.

But it isn’t only locals who buy property on Kangaroo Island – holiday-home buyers make up 50 per cent of the market.

“We do a lot of transactions for mainland vendors to a mainland buyer,” said Mr Barrett. “There are wheels within wheels: we have the holiday-home market, we have the conventional residential market, and we’ve got the conventional farming market.”

High-end tourist accommodation and bespoke local agricultural businesses are also drawing the attention of mainland investors from Adelaide and the eastern seaboard who are drawn by the island’s “clean and green environment”.

Nevertheless, there can be challenges to buying on Kangaroo Island as well. According to Mr Barrett, banks are often reluctant to lend to buyers on the island, so “you need to have more skin in the game”.

The close-knit nature of community life also demands a high level of integrity from real estate agents.

Mr Barrett said: “You have to be authentic here because you’ll go from selling someone a property to then seeing them in the supermarket or the hardware store or the rubbish dump, or you’ll be coaching their kids at football or basketball.”

“So in all things you’ve got to be as authentic and transparent as possible,” he said. “From my perspective, I’d rather lose a deal over compromising your integrity.”

“That’s more valuable to me than anything,” he concluded.

To find out more about how agents are operating across Australia and beyond, check out REB’s previous articles in the Life as an Agent series.

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