After more than a decade inside project sales, Mark Bernberg has closed Ray White Projects Western Sydney and committed himself full time to building technology for the industry he knows.
The business closed at the end of June, according to an announcement from Bernberg, but he insists he is not leaving real estate.
He is changing which part of it he intends to influence.
Bernberg is now concentrating on PRiMAX, the proptech company he co-founded to give property developers and project sales teams greater visibility over what prospective buyers are doing before they speak with an agent.
It is a significant career decision from someone who has reportedly launched more than 40 off-the-plan developments and spent years inside the pricing meetings, sales campaigns and stock allocation decisions that shape major residential projects.
The story is not simply that another real estate business has closed.
It is that someone with extensive frontline project marketing experience believes the larger opportunity now lies in fixing the technology behind the sales process.
For decades, off-the-plan marketing has depended heavily on enquiry forms, phone calls, display suite appointments and the information entered into a CRM.
The problem is that those systems generally begin recording a buyer once that person identifies themselves.
Much of the actual decision-making happens earlier.
A buyer may return to the same floorplan several times. They might compare different apartment stacks, revisit a particular price point or arrive through one advertising campaign before returning through another channel.
Most of those behavioural signals have traditionally remained disconnected from the agent responsible for following up the enquiry.
PRiMAX claims its platform captures that activity, ranks buyers according to their apparent level of intent and feeds the information into the developer’s existing CRM.
Instead of receiving a name and phone number with limited context, a project sales agent could potentially see which floorplans the buyer studied, which prices attracted their attention, how frequently they returned and which campaign originally brought them to the project.
That could materially change the first conversation.
It could also help developers make decisions about pricing, advertising expenditure, stock releases and which buyers should receive priority from the sales team.
PRiMAX says its machine learning models assess factors including repeat visits, floorplan engagement, pricing behaviour and comparative browsing patterns. The company positions the platform as an additional intelligence layer rather than a replacement for the CRM.
The commercial claims are substantial, although they remain company reported.
PRiMAX says the technology is operating across projects in Australia and New Zealand and that more than $2.1 billion worth of property has been sold on projects using the platform. Its published project list includes apartment, townhouse, house and land, commercial, retirement and warehouse developments.
That figure does not mean PRiMAX independently generated $2.1 billion in sales, and it should not be interpreted that way. It represents the stated value of property sold across projects using the technology.
The distinction matters as the real estate industry enters a period in which almost every new platform is being described as AI.
The more important test is not whether a product uses artificial intelligence. It is whether it provides information that changes a commercial decision, improves a sales conversation or helps a team identify an opportunity it would otherwise have missed.
For project marketers, the attraction is obvious.
Off-the-plan campaigns can produce large databases, but database size alone reveals little about genuine purchase intent. A campaign may appear successful because it has generated hundreds of leads, while the sales team spends days calling people who are uncontactable, poorly matched or nowhere near making a decision.
Behavioural intelligence could help separate activity from intent.
It could tell a salesperson not simply that a buyer downloaded a brochure, but that the same buyer returned three times, concentrated on a particular two-bedroom floorplan and repeatedly examined apartments within a specific price range.
That is considerably more useful than another unqualified name sitting in a pipeline.
There are still questions the industry should ask.
Developers will need clarity around data ownership, privacy, model accuracy and the level of human oversight applied to automated buyer scoring. Sales leaders must also ensure technology assists professional judgement rather than replacing it.
A buyer who behaves strongly online is not automatically ready to purchase. Conversely, a serious buyer may leave very few digital signals.
PRiMAX states that clients retain ownership of their buyer data and that the information is not sold or used outside the relevant project. Those assurances will remain important as behavioural tracking becomes more sophisticated.
Bernberg’s move is therefore bigger than a career announcement.
It reflects a broader shift taking place across real estate. Some of the people who understand the industry’s operational problems most clearly are no longer trying to build another agency, team or traditional project marketing business.
They are trying to build the infrastructure those businesses will eventually rely upon.
Bernberg has not walked away from real estate.
He is betting that the next major advantage in project sales will belong to the businesses that understand what buyers do before the telephone ever rings.
That is the bet the rest of the industry should be watching
This article was independently written and edited by Real Estate Today. © Real Estate Today 2026 – All Rights Reserved.
Real Estate Today is the most engaged & influential real estate industry publication throughout Australia and New Zealand.
