How did you get your start in the real estate industry?

I used to own a Harvey Norman franchise. I worked for them for eight or so years but because of the GFC, retail just wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. A guy rang me and said, ‘Why don’t you come on board for our financial planning company?’ So I used to source properties for them, and then that eventuated into selling development sites and all kinds of things. We used to do 70 properties a year. I traveled to Darwin, Canberra, Sydney, just lived on an airplane, sourcing stock, selling stock, and just got sick of it. I got sick of being in Katherine over Easter and being away from my family. I’d never really wanted to be a real estate agent, I guess because of the stigma that was surrounding them, and when I said to my wife, ‘No more traveling, I need to find a good job in Brisbane where I can earn really good money,’ well, you’ve got to be a salesman. I’m a salesman at heart.

How did you start with Coronis?

I applied for the area leader role at Coronis because that’s what I’d done, managed offices and people, I understood selling, but they said to me, ‘We’d rather you sell.’ So my first year in real estate I did just over 700 gross commission income, which puts me in the top .5 percent of real estate agents in the country. I go noticed within the industry doing those kinds of numbers and just doing things differently. I was just being a human being! I don’t want to be the stereotypical stupid real estate agent.

We have five people come through an open home, we’ll get three offers, so I’ll say to the owner, ‘What do you want?’ He’ll say $550,000. So I’ll go back to the best buyer and say the owner wants $550,000 and I’m not going to go back to anybody else if you pay the $550,00, and they’ll say, $545,00, so I’ll ring the owner, cool, done. Then I’ll ring back the other buyers and say, ‘Sorry, there was a more suitable buyer and the offer was accepted.’ Then no one is upset with me because there’s transparency. The feeling you get from that buyer and the owner, that there wasn’t this back-and-forth crap, they love that. It cracks me up when you see people dragging things out for so long, I guess some people want to play the real estate game. So I started selling and realized I do love it, and I do it my way.

So when did you join Coronis?

Just over 15 months ago. I was still selling around this area, but just operating out of a couple of different offices while we were looking for this location [their new Hamilton at Portside office]. This Portside complex is about ten years old, and it’s going to go all the way down to Royal Queensland Golf Club, so it’s going to be one of the biggest urban developments in Brisbane since Southbank back in the 1980s. What an amazing opportunity for us to be the only office down here that does sales, rentals, everything.

What do you envisage your market here will be?

You get a good mix and that’s why you need a good mix of agents as well. I do everything from $300,000 units all the way up to $2.5 million houses. I talk to all my vendors. This market, we really want to focus on 4007 but we can also service about ten suburbs from a 10 to 15 minute drive from here. We have a team of seven now, and we don’t want to get much bigger than that, because you’re better to have seven great agents rather than a big name franchise group which has 30 agents, most of whom are only making one sale a month.

What do you say to people who are thinking about joining the real estate industry but are wary of certain perceptions, like you mentioned earlier?

I’ve had about four or five people through my network come on board with Coronis, and it doesn’t have to be that persona of walk into an office, they through you into a desk with the White Pages and say, ‘Good luck you idiot.’ You have to work for a good company where they train their staff properly. I tell people to look at it like an apprenticeship. I had to take a massive step backwards for probably six months, but it’s worth it. You’ve got to do it with a company that is very focused on training in those early days.

There’s a lot of talk that Sydney is headed for a crash, that Melbourne is possibly overdeveloped. Where do you see the Brisbane apartment market?

Portside, 4007, there is definitely an oversupply of two-bedroom apartments, same as Newstead and West End. They’re probably the three suburbs where there’s probably too much going on. But townhouses are still very good, and smaller unit complexes are selling. Anything that’s ten years old flies out the door because people renovate and like that they can do things to do. Three bedrooms are all right because people always want three bedrooms. Just don’t buy a two-bedroom apartment in Brisbane unless you’re willing to hold onto it for a long time because if you sell it in three or four years, you’ll lose money.

Buy a three-bedroom apartment, buy something different, because the market up here is still very strong because it hasn’t increased as much as Sydney, so it’s still very affordable. I have a lot of friends in Sydney who are pilots and they don’t want to buy there, so I’ve sold them two bedroom apartments in small complexes up here and they’re just renting them out. Kangaroo Point, Indooroopilly. All of them are buying nice apartments in small complexes so there’s low body corporate fees, one or no elevator, and low-risk because of fire sales. I always advise my friends to buy small, boutique developments, and hold onto it! The rental yield is good; it’s a dollar per thousand.

People from Sydney and Melbourne were definitely paying more than locals, and so the only thing that’s hurt our market is the banks tightening up investor lending.

Do you think you’ll see more investors from Sydney and Melbourne enter the Brisbane market this year?

Only if the banks loosen up lending. I’m a mortgage broker as well and I only did it so I could legally talk to people about loans and understand it, but in my six years of selling property, I have never seen it this hard to get financing for investment. They’re just being so strict, some of them are saying you can’t get this interest rate unless you have a 20 percent deposit. Why do you need a 20 percent deposit to buy an investment property?! The banks are just pains.

Coronis Hamilton is located at Portside Wharf: Shop 3, 39 Hercules Street, Hamilton.