In his three decades in real estate, Craig Smith has amassed a huge list of accolades to his name, including reaching the top tier of agents within Ray White and attaining a “Chairman’s Elite” ranking. Based in Titirangi and the owner of five agencies in West Auckland, he works closely with his brother Brendan. Wife Sharon and daughter Rebecca are part of The Smiths team, and two other brothers and a sister are also real estate agents.
Real estate must be in the blood – is everyone in your family in the industry?
Craig: Out of five brothers and a sister, only one brother, Scott, didn’t go into it. Scott’s a scientist, the intellectual in the family.
Brendan: He went on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in Australia [in 2004] and had a shot at the million dollar question. He wasn’t sure so he took the $500,000. I could have told him, I knew the answer! He’d already phoned a friend.
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Who started in real estate first?
Craig: Me, 32 years ago. Our family had a furniture store in Papatoetoe and I worked there. We sold the lease in 1987, just before the stockmarket crash. My dad was 62 and decided to retire. My mother-in-law was in real estate and doing very well, and she kept saying to me, “You’re wasting your time selling furniture, you should be selling real estate.” I was like, “Yeah, yeah.” Back then real estate agents weren’t held in very high regard. The ones I’d seen were 50 and 60-year-old guys in sports blazers and nylon trousers and it didn’t sit with me. But after we sold the business, I did my papers and got into real estate. It was the best thing I have ever done.
Was it hard starting in a new career after the crash?
Craig: Not for me. All these real estate agents were sitting around with their heads in their hands because of the way things had changed after the crash. Before, the market was going up 20% a year, so if you put a house on the market and it hadn’t sold in a month you could add another $5000 to the price. Back then you’d put a buyer in the car and show them six houses, and if they didn’t like any of them, once you got back to the office you’d do the “carpark kiss-off” – you’d get them out of the car and there’d be another buyer in the office waiting to see the same six houses. It was that easy, and after the crash there was suddenly all these properties and not as many buyers.
But I didn’t know that when I started. Everything was new and fresh and exciting. I loved the fact that I was in a business where I had no stock, no staff, no lease. There was just me and my car and my time, and if I did the job well I could make a bunch of money. In my first six months I sold 40 homes.
Did your experience of selling furniture help when it came to selling real estate?
Brendan: I think being a good salesperson is in the DNA and Craig had that. Plus he had learned from a great salesman – our dad, George Smith. Dad came from a really poor background – his father was a street cleaner. He lied about his age and joined the Merchant Navy at 15. He went on to own the furniture business and he was very good at what he did.
Craig: We used to listen to how he talked to people. He would put the same effort and energy into selling a $5 rug as he did a $2000 lounge suite. He used to say every sale is important to somebody, no matter how big or small.
Brendan: I love that, and Craig and I believe the same thing. We treat people the same whether we are selling a $500,000 house or a $2.5m one.
Craig: When I started out I worked hard, but I didn’t mind doing 60 or 70 hours a week. Sometimes I would show a buyer 10 or 11 houses a day. Real estate is all about relationships, and of course the most important relationship is with the vendor. They are your client and you are working to get the best possible price for them. But it pays to have a good relationship with the buyers. They are likely to be selling a house at some point and you want to be that memorable agent who gave good service, so that they ask you to sell their property.
Brendan: Some buyers say, “We paid more than we wanted to because of you guys,” but at the end of the day they are happy because they got the house they wanted. It’s a feel-good experience for them as well as the vendor, even if they do feel like they’ve been squeezed a bit. But it’s our job to squeeze people, as nicely as possible.
When did you decide to follow in Craig’s footsteps, Brendan?
Brendan: About 16 years ago. I was a painter – I did that for 20 years, straight out of school, and I enjoyed it. Craig always said I should get into real estate because I had good people skills. Then I had a life-changing moment when my marriage broke up, and I thought it was time to try something new.
Craig: I’d had knee surgery and was going to be off work for a while. I needed to get someone alongside me and I couldn’t think of anyone better to do it than Brendan. He’s really good at dealing with people. Like me, everything he says, he really means.
Do you work well together?
Brendan: We do. We don’t always agree on things, but we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t disagree sometimes.
Craig: We disagree on politics, we disagree on football teams but when it comes to real estate, we always know what the other one is thinking. It is like a sixth sense.
How was lockdown for you?
Craig: We worked the whole way through, even in level four. I sold five places in level four, all by DocuSign [an online agreements site] and another 17 in level three, even with the restrictions on showing properties. When we went into lockdown, vendors were asking if they should take their properties off the market but I thought, What are people going to do for the next six or so weeks while they are stuck at home? They’ll watch Netflix and some box sets and then they might get on the computer and look at real estate. It was like having a captive audience so I said to the vendors, keep your properties on. And it was massive.
I remember one day being at home in shorts and T-shirt working on seven contracts at the same time with my daughter Rebecca.
So it’s been a good year?
Craig: It’s been the best year for The Smiths. We broke our calendar year record by August. We have been going hell for leather because we don’t know how long it is going to last. I don’t want to be here in four months twiddling my thumbs because the market has slowed down and saying I wished I worked harder when it was busy.
Brendan: It’s taken hard work to achieve a Ray White’s Chairman’s Elite [ranking]. There hasn’t been one in West Auckland before. It’s based on levels of commission reached and
it’s easier to get those amounts in other parts of Auckland where they are selling $10m houses. So that has been huge for us.
And finally, what was the million dollar question your brother Scott didn’t answer?
Brendan: What saint founded the hilltop monastery of Monte Cassino? It was Benedict, and I was right!
