It’s been 25 years since Barry Thom and Grant Lynch set up their own real estate agency, Unlimited Potential, in a bedroom in Barry’s house. Today they still share an office — albeit in a converted former telephone exchange building they own in Remuera — but UP Real Estate has three offices and 100 employees.
Your business partnership has lasted longer than many marriages. What’s your secret?
Grant: We just fit. We’re good friends, we’ve got complimentary skills. We talk about everything.
Barry: Grant looks after the team, the transactions and runs the business side, and I run the marketing side. It’s a very simple set up.
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Grant: We’ve never had an argument in 25 years. Because I am always right! No, we just get on. We never second guess each other.
Barry: We made the decision from the start that we are not going to do anything unless we agree. It might take us a while to find a solution, but until we agree on it, we don’t do it.
Grant: One of the things we agreed about right off the bat was that we would never a live a lifestyle individually that would tax the business’ resources financially. Even today we still have lifestyles well within our means, which I think is a big reason why the company has always been healthy.
Initially we always said if one of us wants to spend more than $500 on something, then let’s just talk to each other about it. That has become an ingrained habit to the point where Barry says to me, “I’m thinking about buying another fridge for the bach.” And I say, “Don’t tell me, it’s your bach.” And he goes, “Yeah, but I just wanted to talk it through with you.”
Can you remember the first time you met?
Barry: It was in 1986, before Grant was in real estate. He was running a development for Fletcher Housing in Remuera. I walked into his office to see if there was anything I could sell.
Grant: After selling our places for a while he said to me, “I think you would enjoy selling real estate, and you’d be good at it.” My background was in construction, I was a quantity surveyor and then I got into property development. The 1987 crash had a lot to do with me moving into real estate. It was pretty life-impacting.
We ended up at the same company and we were at the top, but we had some ideas! So we took our wives to Sydney for the weekend and while we were there we sat down and wrote the DNA for this company, which is what we call real estate by design, and it hasn’t changed in 25 years. We didn’t have a plan for global domination, we just wanted to be masters of our own destiny.
Was setting up on your own a risk?
Barry: We spoke to a few well-respected people about the concept of what we were going to do, and they all said to us, “Are you absolutely mad?” But we did it anyway.
Grant: Very quickly people said, “You look like you are having fun, can we join?” Within about five years the company was big enough that we had to stop selling and run the business.
Barry: What was different about UP was that we wanted to change things from a supermarket-type approach to a more tailored, added-value approach. To make that happen we invested in the delivery of our own marketing. Other firms subcontract; we create everything in-house – marketing, photography, graphic design, commercial printing.
Grant: We could have gone bigger, we could have sold franchises and opened up lots of offices. But we would have lost the ability to have that intimate touch with both our staff and our clients. That’s probably cost us money, but at the end of the day, we love coming to work, we love the UP family.
Barry, aren’t you the same Barry Thom who represented New Zealand in yachting over the years?
Barry: Yes, that’s me. I’ve been sailing since I was about eight. I used to sell boats and was a sailmaker. I got into real estate because I had a mortgage, two kids and no money, so something had to change. One of the things I loved about sail making was dealing with people, and it is very much the same with real estate.
Grant sails too. We bought an Etchell racing boat and we raced in that for eight years, including in Australia and North America.
Grant: When we are on a boat together he’s the skipper and I do as I’m told. I love anything to do with the water, but my main passion is riding a pushbike. I ride three or four times a week with friends.
Barry: We’ve had a lot of fun together over the years. We’ve had a lot of laughs and we’ve done a bit of damage to our bodies and our boats. And along the way, we’ve also managed to build up a business we are both very proud of.
