Diego Traglia is one of New Zealand’s top real estate sales people. He’s Harcourts top agent for the northern region, number two for the company in New Zealand and number three internationally. He’s also been voted number one in the country on Rate My Agent and is currently starring in the Bravo reality TV show Rich Listers. Not bad for someone who left school at 13.
Q: You’re from Italy – what brought you to New Zealand?
I could see there were a lot of opportunities in New Zealand, and life here seemed easy compared to Europe. I had lived in India, where my mum lives, and Holland, where she comes from, as well as Italy. I came here when I was 18. Since then I have lived in Thailand for work, and England, where I was a DJ at clubs and festivals. But I always wanted to come back to New Zealand; this is home.
Q. What did you do before real estate?
Start your property search
A lot of different things. I left school at 13 and have worked more or less since then. I’m streetsmart, not booksmart, and I never had the capacity to sit down and study. I did a year of high school but never really went, so I dropped out. When I came to New Zealand my first job was at Burger King, then I washed cars in South Auckland for six months. I then worked in restaurants and became a DJ, and I also had a digital marketing business. When I came back to New Zealand in 2015 after living in London, I felt like I needed something more, and that’s when I stumbled into real estate.
Q: How did that happen?
My wife and I bought a house in Massey and found that the service was pretty average from most of the agents we dealt with. I’ve had sales roles so I thought I could do a better job of helping people buying and selling houses. It was hard though, I didn’t know a single person in the area around Massey, where I started selling in 2016. I really had to start from scratch to build up a database of clients.
Q: How did you manage that?
The bread-and-butter real estate strategy of door-knocking. Every day, I went out and I knocked on doors. I talked to people to see if they would be interested in getting an appraisal and I got names and phone numbers. It was really tough, it was like pushing a rock up a hill.
Q: Did you get many doors shut in your face?
That’s a polite way of putting it. Yes, I got a lot of rejections. But I kept going. Those first four years of real estate… I don’t want to call them hell, but they were very hard, even when I started to have some success by year three. I had to work really hard.
Q: How long did it take to get your first sale?
Six weeks. It was a property in Swanson Rd that was on the market privately. I rang the owner and came at it from a different angle, and I got the job done. Harcourts has a good network of agents and one of the other agents brought along a buyer. I was really pleased because it’s quite common for people starting in real estate not to make a sale in the first six months or even 12 months. I sold six or seven houses in my first year and made $40,000, which was half of what I had earned in my previous job, so it was tough financially. But the second year was better. I sold 33 homes. My goal had always been to make $100,000 in a year and I managed to get there in my second year.
Traglia: “Those first four years of real estate… I don’t want to call them hell, but they were very hard.” Photo / Fiona Goodall
It didn’t get any easier though. I was working 100-hour weeks, trying to prove myself to the marketplace as a new agent. By the third year I started my own team with a few other agents and a PA. Now, after six years in the industry, I have 15 people in my team – 11 agents, a marketing manager, an operations manager, a PA and a support staff member. I think we are the best real estate team in New Zealand – last year we sold just over 300 homes. We are like a Formula One pitstop – the car comes in and everyone works together to get it refilled and the tyres changed fast. Everyone has their part to play and we get the job done.
Q: Why do you think you have been so successful?
I have worked very hard, I never give up and I always give best care. They say it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at something. If you are working 80 hours a week selling houses, you will have 10,000 hours under your belt in two and a half years.
Also, I have been able to position myself in a way that people understand that I am in expert in what I am doing. I always invest a lot of time and energy into marketing because at the end of the day you can be the best negotiator in the world but if nobody knows about you then you won’t get to negotiate many deals.
I have good negotiating skills; I have always been a bit of a hustler from when I was younger. When I was a kid I was always trying to sell something and make a couple of dollars.
Today I do two things only – I list properties and I negotiate to get them sold. Everything else is done by my team. My competitors use that against me, they say, “You never hear from Diego once you sign the listing” but the reality is the opposite. They hear from me every day because I don’t have to do anything else but talking to the buyers. On a plane the captain doesn’t serve the drink or refill the plane – he takes off, flies the plane and lands it. In my job, I do what is most important.
Q: What do you love about the job?
The challenge of getting property sold, for a price the vendor is happy with. I just want people to be happy. I don’t put the squeeze on my clients, I always ask them twice if they are happy to sell for this amount and if they say yes, then we sell. If they think they could regret it in the morning I tell them to take the night to think about it. It is a privilege, selling a home for someone, and I want to make sure they are happy.
I think this is why I have been rated the number one agent in New Zealand on Rate My Agent for three years now.
I love this job, and this industry. I know that real estate agents have got bad reputations, and I would like to change the perception of them.
Q: How will you do that?
By always doing the right thing. This is a commission-only business so a lot of agents who only have one or two listings really need to get them sold to put food on the table, and over the years there have been agents who have done things that are not always the best for the clients. I sell houses as if I am selling them for my best friend or my parents, I will do the best I can. Sometimes that means saying, “This is not a good offer, let’s try to find something else.” I have walked away from negotiations because I didn’t think it was the best deal for my clients. Just yesterday we decided to take a house off the market because it would be better to wait until the market picks up. I don’t want people to sell and be unhappy.
I believe the industry can do better, and I want it to be an industry where people trust agents. You have family doctors, family lawyers who are trusted, I want to be the trusted family real estate agent. Yes, this is a business and I have to make money but if it is not coming in the right way I couldn’t sleep at night.
Q: How are you dealing with the downturn in the market?
When the market goes down, I double down. I’m still selling a similar amount to what I was selling last year but it is taking a little longer. This is my second time dealing with a slower market – it was tough when I started out – so I have the experience. The average agent, when the tide goes out, you can see he’s swimming without togs.
Traglia, second from the right, with his fellow Rich Lister cast members in Queenstown. Photo / Supplied
For me and my team, because we sell the most properties in Auckland, we have a lot of potential buyers from our other listings that we can take to the properties we are listing now. That’s how we can get the job done.
I have pushed lots of rocks up hill, now I am getting the rewards. I have just spoken at AREC, one of the biggest real estate conferences in the world, on the main stage. I in a reality TV show called Rich Listers which is out on Bravo and NBC America. I don’t know how they found me but I loved filming it.
Q: Do you get time to do anything out of real estate?
The only thing I get time for is family. I have got two little girls aged three and one so I like to spend time with them and my wife. My wife understands what my work involves.
I do make time to exercise – I get up at 5am Monday to Friday to do gym work or boxing or Pilates with my wife. I am good at managing my time. For me, real estate is not a job, it is a lifestyle. If you think of it as a job, you’re in the wrong job.
