Fiona Yang is the sales mastermind and the soul behind the success of billions of dollars of luxurious residential projects in Sydney, Australia.

She co-founded the Plus Agency in 2021 to shake up the way projects are marketed in a city that has become one of the globe’s fastest-growing residential markets and a destination for investment capital from all over the world.

And she has succeeded. In the short span of Plus Agency’s existence, Plus Agency has broken sales records all over the city and won the trust of Australia’s most exciting boutique developers.

“Sales teams were not getting involved in projects early enough,” she told us. “So there was no chance to optimise essential elements of the project to match market demand. Most agencies are willing to accept slow sales and poor market fit, but we want better for our buyers and developers.”

Plus Agency has changed all that under the leadership of Yang and her Co-founder, Managing Director Peter Li.

“We start working as much as six months earlier so that by launch day, we have perfectly positioned the project and we have dozens of buyers already lining up to make a purchase. Our launch events are celebrations where buyers feel like they have to compete with each other to get the residences they want.”

Instead of selling projects slowly, Yang said, Plus Agency usually achieves significant sales results in the first eight hours after launching a project.

Raised in the Property Industry

Yang has a passion for the real estate industry born in her childhood. Her family was involved in development in her home province of Yunnan, China.

Yang studied law at university and became a lawyer at a young age. Still, it wasn’t long until she returned to the family occupation of dealing with real property instead of legal contracts.

When Yang decided to start her own agency, she identified former colleague Peter Li as a partner whose skills would complement hers. They opened their business in February 2021.

 Nearly $200 Million in First-Year of Sales

In its first full calendar year of operation, the company closed sales worth close to $200 million in value. Plus Agency will surpass that record this year, even though the market is much more challenging.

“We generated nearly 5 million media impressions. We were named a ‘Top 50 Real Estate Agency in Australia’ by the Property Tribune, and our agents met with more than 2,000 buyers,” she said.

All this activity has attracted attention. Yang and her team have been the subject of 32 media stories in outlets such as the Herald Sun, News.com.au, the Australian Financial Review, the South China Morning Post, Domain, and the Daily Telegraph.

Today, Yang is marketing new stock worth nearly half a billion dollars.

Perhaps the most potent symbol of Yang’s success at her new agency is the way that long-established price records seem to fall before her like houses of cards.

Breaking Price Records

In the past 12 months, Yang and her team broke the Sydney North Shore Townhouse price record not once, not twice, but three times. They hold the current record of $4.7 million.

They also set a new Killara Townhouse price record at $3.7 million.

Yang helped set an unheard-of sales price record for retail space of $153,358 per square metre. She completed that transaction as co-agent with Colliers and worked alongside her Plus Agency sales manager, Leanne Pan.

“The retail space was right on Circular Quay,” said Yang, “That is the most beautiful and one of the most highly trafficked retail strips in the world.”

Yang is now thinking more and more about the future.

 Making Project Marketing More Sustainable

“We would like to make project marketing 100% environmentally sustainable,” she said.

“So much paper, meaning carbon emissions, is wasted in traditional project marketing, but we are already changing that.”

Yang has spearheaded a project that replaces the $28,000 of paper used for a typical townhouse project —and all the attendant climate emissions— with refurbished iPads.

“Instead of endless piles of paperwork and brochures, we give our buyers free iPads,” said Yang. “It saves both money and trees.”

Yang says using iPads reduces their marketing materials budget by almost three-quarters.

“Most importantly,” she says, “using the iPads has only 0.7% of the climate impact that the paper does.”

And, she added, laughing, “It’s much easier for buyers to walk away with an iPad than with armloads of paper!”

Yang’s new marketing strategies are winning her tremendous success. She has broken records for sales prices in Sydney, and her environmental sustainability efforts are admirable. Yang is changing the real estate game, and we look forward to seeing what more she can achieve.