Behind every top real agent is – or should be – an inspirational manager. For Aman Gulia, who recently made number five in the list of top-selling Harcourts agents worldwide, that’s Dave Findlay, who owns Harcourts JK Realty in Auckland’s Mount Albert. Dave has also picked up prestigious awards himself, including REINZ’s Manager of the Year for 2023 for all of New Zealand.
OneRoof has interviewed Aman before but this was the first chance to sit down with both him and Dave and talk about their partnership, and how it has led to Aman selling over $375 million worth of property in just four years.
Q: How did you get into real estate?
Dave: Property was in my blood. My family was big in development. My dad, Russell, built around 1000 houses in Auckland’s Eastern Bays then he got hit by the GFC and lost it all. He ended up having to sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door to survive. He managed to come back and do it all again, building homes in South Auckland.
Start your property search
I started in real estate when I was 17, and at that age I was running seminars to help people with finance and to get them out of rent traps and into their own homes.
I bought my first house when I was 17. I’d saved up the deposit with a bit of help from my parents. If I got a grade of 90% or above in my exams, I would get $1000, and if I got over 95, I’d get $10,000. It was an incentive to try to do well. I got 90% in School Cert maths and 99 for six form maths. That money went towards buying the house. It was in Papatoetoe and cost $72,000. It was pretty old and crappy so I went to a TV DIY show and said: “If you do the design and labour, I will pay for the materials.” It cost me $15,000 and after the renovation was done it was worth $120,000. I used that money to buy a house in Drury. Since then I’ve been buying rental properties.
Q: How many rental properties do you have?
Dave: A few, including a nine-bedroom boarding house. But I’ve also rented myself for many years. The first time I lived in a house that I owned was four years ago. We did a development on the waterfront in Te Atatu Peninsula and built three houses. I live in one, my sister lives in another and my mum lives in the third one. Before that, I preferred to buy investment properties and rent in Mt Eden, rather than buying in Mt Eden, much to my wife’s dismay.
Q: How did you end up owning Harcourts JK Realty?
Dave: My dad died and that put the development side of things on hold. I left real estate and went into tech for about six years, I was CEO of a payments company and I also helped to set up Skinny mobile. Then my mum, Jill Findlay and stepdad, Keith Ward, started up Harcourts St Lukes and about six years ago asked me to help them grow the business. We then bought Royal Oak and Mount Albert, which have been merged into one now, and I run it. It was hard to start with - we were unknowns and went from practically nothing. We’d go to business-owner meetings and no one would talk to us. At awards evenings, we’d be seated at the back of the room, next to the bar.
Discover more:
- How rugby player Sasa Tofilau went from rent woes to $155m in house sales
- Revealed: TV legend John Hawkesby got $12m for his Waiheke Island estate
- IKEA v orgasms: Housing market surveys throw up weird results
I really wanted to grow more into the development space because I knew so much about it, and I knew I could help people. I could see developers buying land and half of them didn’t know what they were doing. With the change in the Unitary Plan, I saw a big gap in the market for selling property for developments. I set up Development Projects and that’s when we went from obscurity to Harcourts’ top office in Auckland City.
Q: How did Aman become part of that?
Dave: I needed people to work with me who had the same energy to make the most of what I could see was a massive opportunity. A friend mentioned this guy who was at another company, who knew something about subdividing. I called him and set up a meeting.
Aman turned up in this nice BMW I8, with wing doors. I’m not much of a car guy, I drive a $12,000 Lexus. Whenever I see a $100,000 car I think, ‘that’s a deposit on a house’. I looked at Aman’s car and I thought, ‘OK, he’s got a debt to pay. He’s going to need to work really hard’.
Aman: I paid cash. I had no debt.
Dave: From that first meeting, I could tell he had passion. He had made the same connections that I had about the opportunities in development and wanted to make it happen as much as I did. I knew I wouldn’t be wasting my time training him.
Aman: I had been in real estate about seven or eight months when I met Dave in 2020. Before that, I’d worked for a company helping people to subdivide their properties. I could see there were opportunities for vendors sitting on land that was perfect for development, and ways we could help developers to buy the land they wanted.
Dave Findlay says Aman Gulia is the hardest-working agent he knows. Photo / Fiona Goodall
I knew I would have to prove myself to Dave. He provided support and advice but I had to do the rest.
Q: Dave, did Aman hit the ground running?
Dave: Definitely. Nothing was too big for Aman. One of the first sales he did was getting a whole lot of neighbours to sell their properties next to each other in Henderson to a developer and they got good money.
He works really hard. I tell everyone who comes for an interview, “If you can speak to 10 people a day, you’ll make $200,000 a year in this industry.” But most people will speak to 10 people the first day, five the next, then it’s 10 people a week and then it dwindles to nothing. Not Aman. He would go for meetings with homeowners and door-knock all the houses on one side of the street for half an hour. After the meeting, he’d door-knock the other side.
I’d give him five research tasks – he had to read articles in OneRoof or listen to Newstalk ZB. Then he had to tell me what he’d learned the next day about the market and the economy. Knowledge is key.
Aman: Dave has incredible knowledge and I have learned a lot from him.
Dave: We have this thing in the office – if anyone asks me a question and I don’t know the answer, I will pay them $150.
Aman: In four years, I’ve only made $150.
Dave: And that was a trick question. The thing is, I can teach someone knowledge, I can teach them scripts and dialogue and everything there is to know about development. But I can’t teach tenacity or work ethic, and that’s what Aman has.
Q: Has your huge success taken you by surprise?
Dave: I thought we could make it big but I didn’t think it would happen so quickly. To start with, a lot of the big developers wouldn’t even let us in the door because we didn’t have enough of a name. Now they call us asking for sites and advice.
Both Aman and Dave are incredibly supportive of each other. Photo / Fiona Goodall
Aman: I said to Dave from the start, “I want to be Harcourts’ number one agent.” I was by the following year. Now I am number five in the world. I still tell Dave every day that I am going to be number one because I believe in the law of attraction. The awards are great – getting number five in Harcourts internationally means a lot but then after five minutes the excitement is gone and I’m like, ‘OK, what’s next?’ It’s the same with big sales, we can do a $20m deal and it’s exciting and then I want to do a $30m one. I always have goals, I always want to do better.
Dave: We sold church property in Papatoetoe for nearly $20m and that was a long journey – it took two and a half years. We had a lot of big names putting in offers but the church wanted to sell to the right person. They were absolutely over the moon with the deal they got. They’re going to use the money to build an amazing church/daycare/community centre to help the local community. It feels really good when you can be a part of that.
Q: Aman, you’ve bought yourself a McLaren 570S – was that always a goal?
Aman: I like cars. I have been working hard and I wanted to fulfil my dream of owning a supercar. Anything I do, I ask Dave and he gives me a sensible answer. I said, “Should I buy a supercar?”, and he said, “No, it’s a house deposit.” Then he said if I achieved a couple of goals, I could buy the car.
Dave: The first was that he had to hit number one for that quarter, which he did. Then he had to have enough money set aside so he could also buy a house with me. He did – we have bought two houses together this year – so then he could buy the McLaren. It’s important to build wealth and have that behind you so you are not purely dependent on your sales income.
Aman: We spend so much time working we hardly do anything else. I believe you have to find things that make you happy. If I’m having a bad moment, I don’t want to turn that into a bad afternoon or a bad day or a bad week. So I take my car for a drive for maybe 15 minutes and that makes me feel happy. When you’re feeling good, you do good work.
Q: Once you get to the top, is there a lot of pressure to stay there?
Aman: It’s definitely easier when you are climbing up. Of course, we want to continue to do well, so there is that pressure. People think maybe you got lucky but you have to work harder.
Dave: There’s a lot of tall poppy syndrome. If an article gets written about Aman doing an amazing job and getting vendors way more than they thought possible, and getting a great opportunity for developers, when you look at the comments [on social media], they’re full of hate. Some of them are really racist.
Aman with his dream supercar, a McLaren 570S. Photo / Supplied
Aman: If there are 350 comments on an article, 10 will be “well done” and the rest will be things like “Go back to your country” or “you’re ruining the property market”. It’s not too bad now since the market has changed, but a couple of years ago it was really bad.
Dave: He reads every single comment but thankfully he doesn’t take it to heart. You’ve got to have tough skin in this game.
Aman: It’s actually helpful that people comment because the more comments there are on an article, the more people it reaches.
Q: What do you want to achieve next?
Dave: We want to continue to grow – we’ve had 740% growth in the last four years and are in the top three percent of Harcourts offices in the world. It’s not just Aman doing well, there are other people in the business who are successful and we want to keep surrounding ourselves with great people and supporting them.
Aman: I want to keep getting amazing results for vendors and developers and doing big deals. I want to be number one internationally, I want to be a brand. I would love to sell buildings overseas, who knows, maybe Dubai. And I want a Netflix show and a Bollywood movie. That is for real. If someone from Bollywood reads this, Google my number and give me a call.
Dave: I’ve seen him dance and I’ve heard him sing – I don’t think he’s leaving.
Aman: I did the TV show Rich Listers and that was an amazing experience. Hopefully, that will come back. I’m trying to get a Netflix show. I have a cameraman who follows me around so I will have lots of clips for it. The hook will be this immigrant who had no idea about real estate but now sells millions of dollars of property and is the first Indian in the history of Harcourts to be in the top five internationally. Why couldn’t it be a Netflix show? You have to dream big, right?
- Click here to find properties for sale
