Rawdon Christie’s had several changes of job in his lifetime, but to Kiwis, the Brit is best known as the former presenter of Breakfast on TVNZ. Now selling real estate for Barfoot & Thompson, he feels lucky to have landed on his feet in a career that he enjoys but says has its scary elements.
Q: You started out as a teacher – was that always the plan?
No, I just fell into it. I had studied music, which was my passion, but I didn’t want a career as a musician. I got into teaching because I wanted to travel and I thought New Zealand would be an interesting place to come to. My sister saw a job advertised as a music teacher at Kings School in Remuera and that’s how I ended up in Auckland. I thought I’d do it for a year but they wanted me to stay for a second and then a third. I then came and went for a few years, and ended up teaching for six or eight years. Then I worked out that broadcasting was what I really wanted to do.
Q: What inspired the change in direction?
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The Holmes Show. I thought, “That just has to be the best job in the world.” I went back to the UK and studied there, plotting a path which involved going to the BBC, because that’s where I wanted to learn the ropes of the profession. But the goal was always to come back here because by then I had met my New Zealand wife Jo. I started doing news reporting, and ended up presenting Breakfast.
Q: When that came to an unexpected end in 2016, did you have a plan B?
No! It was a relatively sudden end, which meant I left a little earlier than I anticipated, maybe a year earlier [after four and a half years]. I knew I couldn’t go forever, I was definitely running out of steam. There are only so many days you can get up 4am and I thought five years would probably be enough. But I hadn’t planned what I would do next. I meandered around doing various things, eventually running media workshops and working in events, being an MC. I was having a lot of fun and making enough of living, and then Covid came along and bit me.
I remember the day the lockdown was announced in March 2020. I was in Fiji at a conference and by the end of the day, everything I had planned for the rest of the year had been cancelled.
Q: So you thought about real estate?
It was my plan C. Peter Thompson [managing director of Barfoot & Thompson] is a friend and when I first left TV I talked to him about the possibility of doing real estate. But at the time I felt my children were too young for me to completely commit to real estate – and you really have to commit to it, you can’t do it part-time – so I parked the idea. But on the day Covid hit and all my work was wiped out I rang my local Barfoots office in Remuera from Fiji. I had met the manager Carolyn Vernon after talking to Peter years earlier and I said to her, “Would you have a desk for me?” She said, “Yes, we’d love to have you.”
When I got home I said to my wife, “The events and media world is completely screwed so I’m going into real estate.” She just said, “Good on you.”
Jo had gone back to the workforce so there was a bit of a safety net and I thought we could probably make it through the first year. But it can be a worry, working on commission and not having a cheque going into your bank account every two weeks. Even now, it still scares me.
Q: Did you hit the ground running?
Looking back, I did, although I didn’t realise it at the time. I got a couple of listings in my first week and in those first few months I had three or four sales that gave me confidence and momentum, along with the budget to be able to spend a bit of money on marketing. That definitely got the ball rolling. Now I appreciate how phenomenally hard it is to get listings as a new agent. If you can win them, the chances are you will do well, but getting them is really, really tough.
“There are only so many days you can get up 4am”: Christie on his former career. Photo / Fiona Goodall
Q: How did you get those first listings?
One was through somebody I knew; the second one I think was due to the vendor recognising me from TV, and also me blowing my own trumpet. However, I don’t think having a public profile has really made a huge difference. When vendors are choosing someone, it maybe gets my name a bit higher up the pile but most people don’t base their decision on who will sell their house for them on whether someone has worked in TV. It has helped when it comes to relationship building but it certainly hasn’t been a golden ticket to me having listings coming out of my ears.
Q: Have any of the skills you developed in broadcasting transferred to real estate?
In some cases. On Breakfast I met a lot of people every day, all with different personalities, and I’d try to build an almost instant relationship with them, pretty much from the first sentence. Being able to build relationships is also so important in real estate and so is having people trust you.
Plus you have got to be able to keep people calm and positive. In broadcasting it was making people feel calm while they were sitting on the couch; in real estate it is keeping them positive when they are going through a process that is very emotionally charged and stressful.
The other key skill you need in real estate, that you also need in broadcasting, is tenacity. You can’t sit back and wait for things to happen, it’s a very competitive market so you have to go out there and do it.
You’ve also got to be thick skinned about being knocked back, and people saying things about you that aren’t always palatable.
Q: What do you enjoy about the job?
It sounds like a cliché, but it’s the people you get to meet. I’ve met so many great people. I got a lovely testimonial from a vendor whose house I sold last year and at the end it said, “After all of this, I have gained a friend.” That was cool.
I also like the fact that you can be quite independent and flexible in this job. After all those years working for companies like the BBC and TVNZ where you have to work certain days and be somewhere at a particular time, real estate allows you to be a bit more in control of your time.
One thing that has surprised me is that I thought real estate was going to be really cut-throat, even in the office environment. But Barfoot & Thompson Remuera is not like that at all – I got so much support from the others as the rookie. I think that says a lot about the company but also Carolyn Vernon’s leadership.
Q: Have you had any particularly memorable sales?
I will always remember my first, a wonderful little two-bedroom unit in Te Atatu South. It was one of those dream processes where the vendors took my advice and we sold it easily in two weeks through a pre-auction offer. It was so seamless, and what I didn’t realise was that it would turn out to be the easiest of all the sales I have done so far.
The other memorable one is the opposite end of the scale – the sale of a waterfront building with three apartments that took seven months to sell. I went through a stage of thinking it would never sell – it was off the table twice and there were challenges all the way up to settlement. It took all the negotiation skills I had but thankfully the vendor was supportive of what I was doing and that allowed me to get a result in the end.
Q: What do you do when you’re not working?
I like to hang out with my family. My two oldest kids are at university now and we’ve just got the youngest still at school. We try to get down to Lake Tarawera when we can – that’s our place of refuge.
I try to play tennis and squash every week, and I go bike riding – I’m one of those middle-aged road cyclists. I’m a proud lycra wearer but I only go in the dark so nobody can see me in it.
I still play a little bit of music, usually piano which is easy because it is sitting right there. I used to play the violin to a very high standard but I never do now – it feels a bit more like work, having to get it out of its case and practice. With the piano, I can just sit down and play, which I enjoy.