The same franchise brand paid four times less per registration in New Zealand than in Australia

Why does the same franchise offer cost four times more in one country?

You are buying at auction. The two auctions are not the same size.

Australia has more franchisors bidding for the same small pool of people who have the capital and the appetite to buy a territory. New Zealand has a fraction of that competing spend. We launched a separate New Zealand account for this network in March 2026. First full week: 199 registrations at NZ$3.70 each. The Australian account was sitting between A$28 and A$40 in the same period.

The two currencies sit close enough that conversion explains none of this. It is a competition gap.

So should you move the budget to the cheaper market?

No. This is where franchisors burn money.

A cheap registration is worth nothing without a territory to sell and someone to sell it. New Zealand is a smaller country with fewer territories available. You exhaust the addressable market there far faster than in Australia, and the cost climbs to meet the ceiling anyway.

Watch it happen in the chart above. NZ$3.70 in March. NZ$8.20 by late May. Same account, same offer, audience getting worked.

The move is to stop judging New Zealand against an Australian cost ceiling.

What happens when you run both markets from one account?

You get a number that describes neither one.

Australia costs A$28. New Zealand costs NZ$5. Pool them and the report shows you something in the middle. That blended figure is high enough to make you cut the cheap market for looking expensive, and low enough to keep you funding the expensive one because the average looks fine.

We run them as separate accounts. Separate ceilings, separate creative iterations, separate grading thresholds. The reporting stays split all the way through, so the client sees two economies instead of one average.

Did the cheaper registrations actually qualify?

That is the only question worth asking, and most agencies never answer it.

Cheap registrations that never qualify are a faster way to waste your development team’s hours. We grade every registration Green, Amber or Red before a human picks up the phone. On the Australian account in June 2026, cost per Green registration ran A$234.21 on Meta and A$278.04 on Google.

Greens held at 9 per week for three straight weeks while we were cutting the budget. That is the test. If quality collapses the moment spend comes down, the qualification layer was never real.

How do you know when to stop?

When the client tells you to. That is not a failure.

By mid-2026 this network hit the point where their onboarding capacity became the constraint, not their registration flow. They chose to pause rather than sign franchisees faster than they could support them. The account went quiet with the system intact.

That is what a built asset looks like. Campaigns, grading thresholds, audiences, creative library. None of it evaporates because the budget went to zero. It switches back on when the network is ready to take more territory.

What we would look at first

Three things, in this order.

Whether each market has its own cost ceiling or is being judged against a blended average. Whether registrations are graded before they reach the development team. Whether anyone can tell you what a signed franchisee costs, not what a registration costs.