The 38-year-old experienced her first and only black eye while working as a real estate agent, and is one of a growing number of agents speaking out about the horrific conditions they are working under.

The real estate world is now classified as high risk after the Victorian Coroner’s office found that the annual suicide rate within the industry was 13 per 100,000 people.

Ms Bathgate, who has worked in the industry for 17 years, isn’t surprised by the shocking statistics.

She describes a culture of non-stop work, racking up over 60 hours a week and being on call 24/7, while also experiencing violence on the job.

The Sydneysider was assaulted on the job after having a tenant evicted, who was three months behind in rent.

She then had to obtain a garnishee order for $10,000 in unpaid rent to be recovered where $300 was taken directly from the tenant’s bank account.

“The tenant came into the office to express her displeasure at having every cent in her bank account taken to start to pay off the debt and she was really upset,” she told news.com.au.

“I didn’t have any de-escalation training on how to de-escalate that situation and she ended up at the very end of the intense conversation standing up and announcing the only way she could have somewhere to sleep that night was to be locked up in jail.

“She said ‘I guess you are going to have to charge me’ and punched me right in the face and stood up and left the office.”

While the 38-year-old said she was “surprisingly calm” after the terrifying incident, it wasn’t until weeks later she realised how much it had impacted on her life.

Living in a small town at the time meant she couldn’t avoid the woman and if she ever saw her, she would end up “triggered” – experiencing the shakes and feeling unsafe.

The Voice of the Property Manager 2021 report released by MRI Software in February 2022, showed 60 per cent of Australian property managers found dealing with aggressive and abusive owners and tenants as their biggest challenge.

It showed 53 per cent were struggling with mental health and almost one in four intended to leave the industry altogether - twice the number recorded in the inaugural 2018 report.

Antonia Mercorella, CEO of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland, said property managers had been front and centre during the Covid eviction moratorium, ongoing rental reviews and reforms and the recent flooding disaster.

“It has been an unrelenting onslaught of challenge after challenge for property managers over the past couple of years, and this mounting pressure is understandably taking an emotional toll. It’s little wonder that we have seen a wave of resignations amongst this sector,” Ms Mercorella said.

“We’ve heard concerning reports of property managers regularly encountering verbal abuse and, in some cases, even being physically assaulted while simply doing their job.”

‘Incredibly agitated’

Another time Ms Bathgate felt threatened by a tenant during an inspection when she talked about the need to maintain the garden.

He came “uncomfortably” close – towering over her and demanding she delete the photos she had taken.

“I felt incredibly threatened and complied and deleted them straight away as I wasn’t sure what would happen next – the garden was much less important than my physical safety,” she said.

“We had a few phone calls following it and he was incredibly agitated every phone call so any time I went back to property to perform the inspection, even if he said he wouldn’t be home, I brought another person with me as I didn’t feel safe.”

Surprisingly, it wasn’t these incidents that caused Ms Bathgate’s depression but the insane workload agents are expected to take on in the industry.

She had dreamt of being an agent ever since she was 12 and wanted to make an impact on lives after being blown away by the care shown by the person who sold her parents their first home.

But the reality of the job was “heartbreaking”.

‘Sense of dread’ over the next catastrophe

After being made a department manager at just 21, where she was in charge of seven people who were looking after between 800 and 1000 properties, Ms Bathgate said things really came unstuck.

“That is when I realised I did not have a time in the day to get everything done that needed to be done and that’s when things started to unravel for the first time,” she said.

“I would say that in that particular role I experienced what I would call burnout.

“It was while I was in that role I was diagnosed with depression and received treatment for depression and I just remember being exhausted and just feeling like I’m never going to get on top of my to do list.”

Recent research found that 65 per cent of real estate professionals suffer from poor mental health, according to Domain.

It actually saw Ms Bathgate leave the industry for three years to run a beauty business but she later returned to property management.

She was then diagnosed with anxiety in her early 30s, which she still deals with today.

“It meant every time the phone rang my heart would race, every time a new email would come into my inbox my heart would race,” she explained.

“I would feel sense of dread as I wasn’t quite sure what catastrophe I was going to have to deal with or whether I was going to cop an earful of abuse or something going wrong at a property.”

Ms Bathgate said the industry overall has been terrible with dealing with mental health issues brought on by the job alongside overwhelming workloads.

“Because we are dealing with landlords biggest investments and tenants homes – the place they live in – almost everything feels like it should be treated with absolute urgency as an industry,” she said.

“But as an industry we have done a terrible job creating boundaries about being at home and not allowing our phone to ring all through the night or responding to messages all through the night.

“In an attempt to provide a decent service, we have made ourselves available 24/7 and its done pretty terrible things to people’s mental health.”

She added she feels “regret” about not creating a better work/life balance, particularly as her dad is now terminally ill.

“Ten years ago he wasn’t terminally ill and had much more available time that I could have spent with him instead of spending it working,” she said.

“I feel like it had a pretty big impact on that time you never get back.”

‘Trapped in golden handcuffs’

When Andy Reid moved from running bars and restaurants into real estate, he was on a high when he sold three houses in the first week but he said things got “difficult” and the industry later “broke” him.

“When you go from initially being a general manager in hospo where everyone wants to be your mate to a real estate agent where people actively cross the road to avoid you because of what you do I found that really hard,” he said.

“It’s a real culture shock for people … to come into an industry that has this sort of stigma, even though every industry has its good and bad, it’s very public with real estate.”

The 38-year-old admits he thought the industry wasn’t for him but found it hard to leave when he was financially doing well.

“You can find yourself trapped in golden handcuff and it sets expectations from a lifestyle point of view at a certain level, but it’s not all rosy all the time,” he explained.

“It can impact you a hell of a lot, as there are high emotions that come with real estate transactions, particularly in sales, and with property management it’s basically a thankless job, where you have tenants blaming you and also landlords blaming you but you are expected to deal with everyone’s problems.”

The award-winning auctioneer added on the sales side there is a lot of pressure to sell a certain amount of properties otherwise your job can be in question, while the impact of Covid had hit property managers hard.

“Many property managers are at breaking point because of scale of pressure with rent relief schemes and moratoriums and you’ve got landlords going broke and tenants going broke and they’re looking at a property manager who isn’t equipped to give them answers to try and bail them out of life changing situations,” he said.