Agents’ baptism of fire: ‘The first properties we sold were two leaky townhouses’

When working in the corporate world started to lose its appeal, Lisa and Steve Stone cast their eyes around for a new career that would be both emotionally and financially rewarding. An online quiz led them to real estate and today the couple are among Ray White’s top agents.

Q: What did you do before real estate?

Lisa: We’d both been in sales and marketing in the corporate world. I’d worked for companies like IBM, Telcom and Telstra Saturn. We’d come back to New Zealand after living overseas and we thought, What can we do that doesn’t involve the corporate world?

Steve: I’d set up Orion Health [a global healthcare software company] in Europe and when we came home after living in the UK I really didn’t want to go back into the corporate environment. We had a café for a year and that put us off ever doing anything like that ever again. It has to be a calling – it really is hard work. One day I did an online quiz on a jobssite, a kind of aptitude test. I thought it was probably a bit of a crock, engineered to get people to think they were suited to real estate – but after I did it I was contacted by a business owner from Harcourts. I did start to think about it and one morning Lisa and I were going for a walk and I said, “I’m thinking about real estate.” She immediately said, “I’ve already thought about it.”

We talked to a bunch of people about it, and decided it sounded like a good idea. I went into it first, 12 years ago, and Lisa started two months later. We ended up working for Harcourts’ Remuera office. We’ve now been at Ray White City Realty for over six years.

Q: What it risky for you both to start in a commission-based industry at the same time?

Steve: It was a huge risk. A lot of new people these days seem to get an advance on their commissions but 12 years ago when we started I don’t think anyone paid any kind of retainer. We had some money to get us through the first six months, but not very much.

Q: Can you remember your first sale?

Lisa: The first properties we sold were two leaky townhouses in a big complex that were owned by a friend of mine from IBM. The contract had so many clauses because they had been through a court hearing.

Steve: We managed to sell both of them, just after the auction. As it happens we now live very close to them and look out on them – they’ve been re-clad – so they’re part of our view.

Lisa: We thought, If we can sell those, we can sell anything.

Steve: Then we had a bit of a lull after that where we didn’t sell anything. Thankfully things did get going again, and we got lots of listings, most of them through people we knew.

Lisa: In that first year, we were rising stars for Harcourts’ northern region.

Steve: It is a really hard business to get going in though. Anyone who says they haven’t struggled isn’t telling the truth.

Q: Why do you think you’ve done so well?

Steve: I guess it is always doing our best for our clients, and putting them first. It’s not about us, we don’t have big egos.

Lisa: We try to take as much stress out of the whole process as possible. We’re aware that this is a big deal for people.

Steve: We see people at their best and their worst, depending on why they are selling the house. Some people are in a difficult position, maybe selling because they are separating or their partner has died. You also get people who are having to sell for financial reasons. You have to be sensitive to that.

If you want success and longevity in this business, you have to be honest. If you’re not straight up, Auckland is a small place and it gets around. You need to do the right thing.

The Stones switched careers after taking an online quiz. Photo / Fiona Goodall

Q: Real estate involves self-promotion – how do you handle that?

Steve: It’s just part of the job, you get used to it.

Lisa: You do always have to be “on”. But for us, it’s about getting on with the job of selling the house rather than saying, “Look at us.” We do do things like Facebook live videos, but that’s more about giving people information, and telling them what is happening in the market.

Q: What’s it like working together?

Lisa: We’ve done it for about 20 years – we started working together in the UK – so we are used to it. We sit in different offices so we are not on top of each other all the time. We both recognise that we’ve got different strengths.

Steve: We do some stuff together, like doing the appraisal and signing up the house, then one of us project manages it. We have a 200-point checklist we go through so nothing gets lost – we’re both very process-oriented. Just one of us does the open homes. It doesn’t make sense to do the open homes together, it doesn’t add any value. We will use our different strengths – for example Lisa writes the words for the advertising because she’s good at that.

Q: Do you take work home with you?

Lisa: You can’t help but take it home with you; this is a 24/seven job.

Steve: 365 days a year. Last year I got a call on Christmas morning from a buyer.

Lisa: It is pretty relentless. You wake up in the morning and the first thing you say is, “Where are you at with blah blah blah?” But sometimes you have to say, “Okay, I’m not talking about real estate anymore, let’s talk about something else.”

Steve: You do need to take breaks or otherwise you’d burn out and get pretty cranky. We usually take Thursdays off. But the phone is always on.

Q: Do you get time for hobbies or interests?

Lisa: I walk every day.

Steve: I go to the gym.

Lisa: That’s our downtime. And we also love to travel.

Steve: We recently went to Aitutaki and we forwarded our phone calls to our sales associate Dylan and our operations manager Celine and that actually worked really well.

Q: What do you love about the job?

Lisa: The people. It’s a people business, it’s not about the houses. We’ve met a lot of interesting people along the way, including some who have ended up becoming really good friends. And the satisfaction of being able to help people.

Steve: You can really make a difference to someone’s life by helping to sell their house. It’s nice to see things like when we sold a house for a couple moving to a retirement village, and they said afterwards that they never realised how many things they would be able to do, like going on a cruise, because they’d got more money than they were expecting. It really changed their lives and it’s great to have been a part of that.