Raine & Horne opens Melville office under rural WA chief Wetherall

Raine & Horne has opened a residential office in Melville, south of Perth near Fremantle, under Gerald Wetherall, who has led Raine & Horne Rural WA since 2021. The office will provide sales and property management and plans to build a team of six to eight sales agents.

Raine & Horne Melville will cover Melville and surrounding suburbs including Fremantle, Coogee, North Coogee, South Coogee and Rockingham, out to Canning Vale. It will operate from premises shared with Raine & Horne Rural WA and West Coast Livestock, a wool and livestock marketing business closely aligned with the group, Raine & Horne said in its announcement on 5 November.

The structure is the interesting part of the move. Rather than opening a standalone suburban franchise, Raine & Horne is attaching a metropolitan office to an established rural and agribusiness operation, with the aim of handling clients who move between Perth and regional Western Australia.

"A lot of country people also own properties in Perth, so having a residential office in Melville allows us to look after clients in both markets," Mr Wetherall said.

The group gave one example. Mr Wetherall recently sold a home in Dowse Court, Coogee for $1.4 million, and the vendors then bought a rural property in the Avon Valley through a Raine & Horne Rural WA representative based in Brookton. Mr Wetherall said the purchase was a retirement tree change for owners who already had a hobby farm in the region. For the network, that is two commissions from one client move, kept inside the same business.

Recruiting into a softer market

Mr Wetherall has previously run residential offices in Bayswater and Midland, and has managed agribusiness operations across regional WA that included rural and residential sales and property management. He plans to begin recruiting sales staff immediately.

"We will build a team that complements our current business, and if we could end up with probably six or eight salespeople, that would be really good," he said.

He will be hiring as Perth conditions shift. The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia's October data, released on 4 November, showed 9,129 active listings across Perth, up 217 per cent on a year earlier, with about half of all houses now selling below the asking price. More stock gives a new office more listings to compete for, but agents can expect longer campaigns and harder price conversations with vendors.

Mr Wetherall said family ownership was a factor in expanding under the Raine & Horne brand, noting his livestock and real estate businesses were also family run. The Melville opening follows other recent growth for the network, including a new North Lakes office in Queensland and a Raine & Horne Rural operation in Brisbane.