Off plan or secondary, which pays more

Who is actually paying you

This is the difference everything else follows from, and it is often the last thing explained to a new agent.

On an off plan sale, the commission is generally paid by the developer to the brokerage, under terms the brokerage has agreed with that developer. Your client does not pay it. That has an obvious advantage in a conversation with a buyer, and a less obvious consequence: the terms governing your money are in an agreement between two companies that you are not party to and usually cannot see.

On a secondary transaction, the commission is agreed with the client and settles through the transaction itself. The terms are visible, the amount is known at the point of agreement, and the person paying is the person in front of you.

Neither arrangement is better. But an agent who does not know which applies to a given deal cannot answer basic questions about their own pay, and that is a common state to be in.

1. 01

   Off plan

   Developer pays the brokerage under a commercial agreement. Rates and terms vary by developer, by project, and by the brokerage's relationship with them.

2. 02

   Secondary

   Agreed with the client and settled around transfer. Visible terms, known amount, one payer.

Timing, which is where the difference bites

A secondary transaction concentrates its risk before completion and then resolves. Once the transfer happens, the money is due and the outstanding question is only your firm's internal payment trigger.

An off plan sale can stretch far beyond the sale itself. Developer commission is frequently tied to the buyer's payment schedule or to construction progress, which means a transaction agreed today may pay in instalments across months or, on some projects, considerably longer. Some developers pay a portion on booking and the balance later; others pay on milestones the agent has no visibility of and no influence over.

For an established agent with reserves, a long tail is an annuity and a good thing. For an agent in their first year, it is a transaction that felt like a success and does not pay rent. This is the single most useful thing to understand before choosing where to specialise early.

Ask your firm directly: on the projects we sell, what is the payment schedule from the developer to the agency, and what is the schedule from the agency to me. Those are two different questions and both have answers.

Clawback, and why it deserves its own conversation

This is the part most new agents have never been told and the reason the two are not simply a choice of cashflow shape.

Off plan sales can fail after the fact. A buyer may default on a payment plan, or cancel, and where the developer's commission was conditional on completion or on payments being made, the commission can be reclaimed. Where the agency has already paid the agent, the agency will generally look to recover it, and the mechanism for that is whatever your contract says.

So the question is precise: if a buyer defaults after I have been paid, what happens to my commission? Is it deducted from future earnings, invoiced back to me, or absorbed by the firm? All three arrangements exist and they are very different to be on the wrong side of.

Secondary transactions have their own late failure modes, but a completed transfer is substantially more final. That difference in finality is worth as much as several points of rate to somebody without reserves.

None of this argues against off plan work. It argues for reading the clause before you build a year around it.

What each one asks of you as an agent

The skills are less interchangeable than the job titles suggest.

Off plan rewards product knowledge across projects, developers and payment plans, plus the ability to explain construction risk and handover timelines honestly to somebody buying something that does not exist yet. Much of the demand is investor demand, a good share of it international, and the work is often volume across a smaller number of developments you know deeply.

Secondary rewards knowing physical stock and the mechanics of a transaction: what a building is actually like, what a service charge does to a return, why one stack is worth more than another, and how to hold a chain of people together through a transfer that can fail at several points. It is more local, more relationship-led, and the knowledge compounds in one place.

Agents do both, and many should. But the person who tells you one of them is simply more lucrative is describing their own book rather than the market.