Super agents: nation’s property elite
From Property | November 15, 2019 | By JONATHAN CHANCELLOR
Our round-up includes those agents who have topped the sales around Australia this year and in years past.
BILL MALOUF
Bill Malouf has carved out his career in real estate after working in the family hotel business in Sydney’s western suburbs for two decades. “I asked for a desk at LJ Hooker and if I did not prove myself in six months they didn’t have to pay me,” he recalls. “I’m still here!” Malouf has been their top national sales person 19 times since the mid-1980s and in 2006 entered the LJ Hooker Hall of Fame.
He says he’s been challenged in the current market by the unethical practices of some rival estate agents intent on securing their listings. “I do strongly believe that our industry needs to be cleaned up,” he says. “I’m finding that agents are so desperate for the business they are giving vendors unrealistic expectations. I don’t believe we are viewed by a lot of other professions as credible and honest people.”
Availability of stock in the eastern suburbs has dropped by around 45 per cent compared to two years ago, says Malouf, who is the top seller in Sydney this year.
In conjunction with Christie’s International agent Ken Jacobs, he secured the off-market sale of the Point Piper waterfront of Westpac board member Steve Harker, for around $40 million, to the start-up investor Alexandra Jakob and her entrepreneur partner Gabriel Jakob. He also had a hand in the recent sale of the heritage sandstone mansion Bomera, on the Potts Point clifftop. It reportedly fetched around $34 million when bought by the steel baron Sanjeev Gupta, who will soon vacate his Bellevue Hill rental, Barford. Malouf sold it, along with agent Clint Ballard, for Leanne Catelan, the daughter of the late RP Data founder Ray Catelan, who paid $12.5 million for it six years ago.
Malouf has a passion for the water – “Any free time I may get throughout the year I love to spend on or close to the water,” he says – and his greatest successes in real estate have been on the harbour. In 2007 he secured the national price record for a single home with Routala, a harbourfront home at Point Piper sold for $29 million to Rubicon founder Gordon Fell and wife Philippa. The year before, he and then colleague Brad Pillinger sold the “Bang and Olufsen” house nearby to the McWilliam family for $24 million.
Malouf now works with his son, David. “We clash,” he says, “but we also bounce off each other.”
BRAD PILLINGER
Brad Pillinger’s only career has been in real estate. He started in residential at Double Bay in 1995, having been at Gilmour Commercial at Parramatta for the previous five years.
“My parents were insistent I get a start without any of my dad’s influence,” the son of the late industry doyen Ron Pillinger recalls. “I was inspired into this industry.”
His highest sale came in 2017 when Portofino in Point Piper fetched $60.66 million for the car dealer, Neville “Croaky” Crichton. “It took a year to do,” says Pillinger. “It was great fun as the property is amazing. The vendor and purchaser were such entertaining personalities.” He relished working with the conjunctional agent Bart Doff.
Since then he’s sold another in Point Piper for $50 million-plus for the Fell family. His first waterfront for $8.25 million came in 2000. “The buyer was offered $65 million last year,” he says.
Pillinger recalls that he and his father talked endlessly about how to improve at sport, academic pursuits and how to execute difficult sales. “The thrill of the sale is always fantastic regardless of price point and regardless of how many times I do it.”
WILLIAM PORTEOUS
William Porteous, Perth’s biggest name in real estate for four decades, worries that the computerisation of the sales process presents the biggest challenge to the art of salesmanship.
“No one ever sits down and eyeballs anyone anymore – it’s all email and text messages,” he laments. But he loves the globalisation of the market, and being able to contact anyone instantly wherever they are in the world.
He began his journey in real estate in 1971, working for Alan Bond at Bond Corporation. “Even though I was not employed as a salesman, I went into a 100-unit development and sold three properties on my first day,” he says.
This year he secured WA’s biggest sale – a family estate on Mosman Park’s Chidley Way that fetched $12.05 million. He sold the house next door two years ago for $21.5 million.
Porteous has regularly held state, and national, house price records. In 2009 he sold a Mosman Park compound for a then record $57.5 million. The Swan River’s mansion mania saw Porteous hold another Australian record too. It was a home on Jutland Parade, Dalkeith, sold in 1980 for $4 million to the mining speculator Danny Hill.
VIVIEN YAP
Perth agent Vivien Yap is the number-one female principal selling agent in the Ray White network, as she nears $1 billion worth of property over her still short career – she only moved into real estate in 2012.
Her biggest sale came last year, when she sold a block of land on the Swan River for $17 million. The 6580sq m Oswal family holding was once home to the never completed mansion dubbed Taj on Swan. “It had been languishing on the market for more than a year due to all the negative press,” she says. “For me, it was a massive sense of pure relief mixed with excitement that I finally did it.”
Yap had to deal with local as well as international buyers, as well as vendors’ representatives in Dubai, India, US and Sydney.
She joined Ray White in 2017, having been at LJ Hooker, where she had been recognised as its top-selling principal, the first time the award went to a woman. She had spent more than 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry.
“I saved money from my first pay packet to buy my first property,” she says. “I have always believed in property as an asset class.”
BEN COLLIER
Ben Collier, one of the founders of The Agency, specialises in prestige real estate in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. He has secured records across many suburbs, including Centennial Park, Bellevue Hill, Paddington and Woollahra. “I never take for granted that I’ll obtain a listing, nor do I take for granted securing a sale,” he says.
Collier arrived in Sydney in the early 1990s from Grafton and real estate is virtually all he knows. “I knew I wanted to enter real estate in the Paddington and Woollahra markets, and so I spent four weeks researching who were the four most proactive agents in the area,” he recalls. The leading McGrath Partners agent James Dack was one of those four. “I called him every day for weeks.” Collier was offered work experience and became a sales assistant two years later. The biggest sale of his career came last year, in conjunction with veteran agent Bart Doff, when the trophy home Rona in Bellevue Hill sold to the Scheinberg family for $58.3 million. Late last year Collier sold a Coolong Road, Vaucluse, property for $38.8 million and this year he secured the sale of a Tivoli Avenue home in Rose Bay for $23.5 million.
STEVE YANNARAKIS
Tasmanian agent Steve Yannarakis, who heads St Andrews Estate Agents Hobart, believes one of the best preparations for real estate was training as a property valuer. “This is an incredible grounding,” he says. “I am still amazed at how many agents have little to no idea of how property ownership works.”
He says if he could change one thing about the industry, it would be to have higher education and training standards for agents. “Better-informed agents have better credibility with sellers and buyers alike,” he says. “Training in ethics, property law, valuation methods and demographic trends.”
Yannarakis secured Tassie’s biggest sale in the past 12 months, selling a Battery Point home on the Hobart riverfront, for $4.4 million. He says it was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to acquire one of Hobart’s most significant residential properties. Set on a 1175sq m Derwent River block, the home dates from 1896, with an extension added in the mid-1990s. “Not a big price by Point Piper or Toorak standards, but by Tasmanian standards, where recent price growth has been impressive,” Yannarakis says.
RICHARD AND SOPHIE LUTON
Richard Luton founded his own real estate company in Canberra two decades ago, partly out of uncertainty about his three daughters gaining employment.
Now daughter Sophie is his colleague, and the pair hold the mantle for securing the highest house price in the ACT in the past 12 months – a $4.5 million sale in Forrest. In 2017 they set the house price record in Deakin, selling a Terry Ring-designed home for $5.75 million and topping the previous suburb high by $1.45 million.
Richard, who grew up on a farm in the Snowy Mountains region, says it’s not an easy job but it is a very rewarding one, both morally and financially. “Getting to know so many people, assist them moving into their next stages of life and creating lifelong clients and friends is an amazing combination,” he says.
He says he combines old-school approaches with innovation. “There will always be the importance of the simple old ways –communication, negotiation skills and empathy – but you need to be able to incorporate change into your style and business with an ever-changing industry.”
KEN JACOBS
Ken Jacobs is arguably Australia’s leading prestige agent, with consecutive national house price records to his name. He says he’s working on the next. The Christie’s International principal has secured the past three top sale prices in Sydney: the $70 million sale of the Vaucluse home La Mer, on behalf of casino tycoon James Packer and his then wife, Erica, in 2015; the $71 million record sale of Double Bay’s Elaine to Atlassian billionaire Scott Farquhar, in 2017; and the neighbouring Fairwater to Farquhar’s business partner Mike Cannon-Brookes a year later for $100 million.
His sales include taking prices through the $20 million barrier when Boomerang, a Spanish Mission home on Sydney Harbour at Elizabeth Bay, was sold in 2002 for $20.7 million.
“Prior to real estate I was licensed with the NSW Health Department as an optical dispenser but, excuse the pun, I couldn’t see it as my future,” he says. “Real estate offered a diversity that intrigued me.” He says the industry has evolved but it’s still “fundamentally about people, not property. People and what motivates them have not changed.”
MATT LANCASHIRE
Brisbane agent Matt Lancashire holds the Brisbane house price record. In 2016 he sold the city’s most expensive property, at Kangaroo Point, for $18.48 million. This topped his earlier sale, when Balaam in Hamilton was sold for $11.8 million in 2015.
“Nothing beats selling a property for a client for a record price,” the principal of Ray White New Farm says, adding that the new world of technology has been a “game changer”.
Lancashire’s love of real estate includes building a few houses himself, the most recent in Teneriffe, where he gained national coverage for his “Bat cave” style gym. He moved into real estate in 2006, landing his first job with agent cum auctioneer Haesley Cush, and believes his apprenticeship as an electrician helps gives him an edge. “I have a thorough understanding of how construction works,” he says.
There’s only one thing he would change about real estate, he says: how easily agent licences can be obtained. “I believe they give away licences way too easily,” he says. “I think they should regulate who comes into the industry. Real estate agents have that bad name because there are cowboys in the market.”
SARAH HACKETT
Brisbane estate agent Sarah Hackett recently secured Brisbane’s highest price for a house sold at auction, and the top sale of the year. The Bulimba riverfront went for $8.4 million.
“It was a beautiful family home on a large parcel of land on the riverfront,” Hackett says of the five-bedroom residence.
The Place Bulimba managing director says the best feeling is when she secures a great listing. “That is really the hardest part,” she says. “A beautiful home in a great position will have a lot of interest from prospective purchasers, so when the sale eventuates it’s kind of a pat on the back for the process but the exhilaration is when you first get appointed.”
Hackett sold her first property working as a receptionist at a real estate office more than two decades ago. She dropped out of university where she was studying science before her real estate career took off. “A number-one LJ Hooker agent suggested I try real estate and said she believed I would be excellent at it,” she says.
Her highest apartment sale came in 2016, when she sold in the city for $8 million. The data shows it sold to Kevin Rudd and Therese Rein.
SEAN CUSSELL
Professionalism and negotiation skills are what set the good agents apart, especially in a tough market. That’s the view of Christie’s International, Prestige Homes of Victoria principal Sean Cussell.
Recently Cussell has been credited with two of Melbourne’s highest ever sales, a record-setting off-the-plan deal, plus the off-market sale of Melbourne’s priciest residence. “Both of these sales are confidential,” he says. “They were created from matching private clients, off market, through my private client register.”
He is credited with securing Melbourne’s highest sale in the past 12 months, the $30 million off-the-plan penthouse in the yet to be built St Moritz complex in St Kilda, to the former Domain boss Antony Catalano.
Stonington, the Malvern mansion of art dealer Rod Menzies, sold to Chinese interests for a Victorian house price record of $52.5 million, with the local press giving credit to Cussell and the Kay & Burton agent Michael Gibson.
The 1890s home, built by Cobb & Co partner John Wagner, bettered the previous $39 million record for a Toorak sale in 2017.
ALISON COOPES
Sydney agent Alison Coopes, who runs her own agency, Agency by Alison Coopes, wears the mantle for the highest house price sale by a woman in real estate. She has sold the Point Piper trophy home Altona twice – first for $52 million in 2013, then again three years later for $61.8 million, both times in conjunction with listing colleagues. She also secured the highest sale in 2016, a $47.8 million Carrara Road, Vaucluse harbourfront.
Coopes was working in recruitment in the mid-’80s when the Richard Ellis agency engaged her to find someone capable of marketing the Quay, the first off-plan Sydney CBD high rise to be marketed. “After I presented candidates they approached me to ask if I would take on the role instead,” she recalls.
She went on to work in Double Bay, for Laing and Simmons, LJ Hooker and Ray White.
Coopes says the biggest change she has seen in the real estate industry is that sales are now all about the agent, not the agency: “It is very personalised and the owners look long and hard at your track record and performance.
GRANT GIORDANO
South Australia Sotheby’s principal Grant Giordano said that the thrill of the sale once motivated him, but now there’s more to it. “As you grow in the industry, the adrenaline rush is replaced more by feelings of relief or empathy on behalf of your vendor,” he says. “Securing their financial future is extremely gratifying.”
Giordano recently secured Adelaide’s third-highest house sale, at more than $6 million. There was also a seven-bedroom beachfront mansion in Tennyson that he sold for $5.2 million.
His biggest sale in the past 12 months, however, was in Switzerland, when he sold a home on a lake in Versoix for nearly $10 million.
After gaining some property experience in the US, he moved to Australia. “I wanted to apply what I’d learned in exclusive Toorak,”
he says. After sales totalling $50 million in 18 months, he relocated to head up the Sotheby’s Adelaide office. His latest prestige listing is a 2013-built Heathfield home in the Adelaide Hills designed by Woods Bagot, that won the South Australia Institute of Architects best New Home category in 2018.