Auckland husband-and-wife Trent and Julie Quinton and their team at Quinton & Co have sold three quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of property, scooping numerous awards as top salespeople for Bayleys along the way. They specialise in apartments and have high standards when it comes to which developments they’ll sell.
Who got into real estate first?
Julie: I did. I’ve always had a passion for property. I had my boys really young and I bought and sold houses to make money. Some I renovated. I also built new ones. I really enjoyed the design part of it and project managing. I’ve got a bossy, creative side!
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But I had never thought about getting into real estate until I got a phone call from my sister one day about 15 years ago.
She’s in the restaurant business and knows Mike Bayley [managing director of Bayleys] well. One day he was in having lunch and talking about how he wanted to get a generation of new blood into the industry. Amanda said, “My sister would be perfect for the job!” So I went for an interview, and that was it.
How soon did you follow suit, Trent?
Trent: Pretty quickly. I’m from Sydney originally and I went straight from school into the horse racing industry, becoming a trainer like my father. I did that for 10 years then moved here, but I found the racing industry in New Zealand was very different to Australia. I decided to try something new, so I sold cars for the Giltrap Group. It was a fantastic job but then Julie was doing well in real estate and loving it and she said, “Trent, come to Bayleys.” So I did as I was told!
Did you start off working together?
Julie: I was working with Diane Jackson, selling character properties. Trent went into the commercial side of the business.
Trent: We said to each other, “Right, whoever is doing the best after 12 months will join the other one in either commercial or residential”. There was a bit of competition and you can see who won that one! I enjoyed commercial but with residential there is more emotion. We’re selling people’s biggest asset and it is important that the agent has a passion for that.
I think Julie and I are pretty good at empathizing with people and striking up relationships, which is what real estate is all about. Julie and I didn’t actually start working together until about 10 years ago.
Julie: We got our first opportunity to work together selling off plan. Trent really blossomed into that role and that’s when our working relationship clicked.
Is it challenging, working closely with your spouse?
Trent: We love it. We work really well together. We’re both Librans!
Julie: We work quite differently, and we complement each other.
Trent: I like being in one spot, based in the display suite and getting to know the product inside-out. Julie does that as well but she also does a lot of getting out and about, meeting new people and working on her secondary business selling character properties. Julie basically runs the team, we do as we are told.
Do you switch off when you get home at night?
Julie: No. We talk about work all the time. It’s the kind of job where you never click off. It’s essentially a lifestyle.
Trent: We live and breathe real estate but we also like to have fun. We have an amazing team who are the same and we like to have a good night out together. We enjoy socialising.
Julie: We work hard and we play hard. Some people joke that we should have our own TV show.
Trent: The majority of our close friends work in real estate too. Our original manager, Rachel Dovey, has become one of our closest friends. She’s been our biggest supporter for the last 15 years and I don’t think either of us would be in the business if it wasn’t for her.
You specialise in selling residential developments. How is that different to selling other properties?
Trent: We are involved from the outset with the architect, making sure the master plan for the whole development is viable and what people want. As agents, we speak to buyers every day and we hear what they are looking for. If you don’t get that right up front it can make things trickier.
Julie: We can give the developers advice on everything from layouts to marketing. We believe we are a valuable part of the team, and there aren’t many developments we have taken on where we haven’t been there from the start.
Trent: And that means that we can be working on a single project for around three years.
Julie: We do pick and choose what we do. If we don’t believe in something then we don’t want to work on it. We work with developers who have quality buildings, and who we trust.
Are you tempted to buy apartments yourself?
Julie: All the time. We see some amazing places. We have got eight rental properties and the majority are in developments we’ve been selling in. We can say to people, we have actually bought in the building and that’s a big tick of approval.
Our own home is a villa in Grey Lynn that we just spent two years renovating. It still has the villa frontage, but when you come in, basically all the old part of the house has been stripped and there’s a big extension. We’ve loved the journey of renovating it.
What do you do with your time off?
Julie: We like to travel, although that’s on hold now for a while. We have family in Australia so we go there a lot, and we can’t wait until we’re able to do that again. My youngest son and his wife are having a baby over there – we’re going to have a grand-daughter in December, which is very exciting – and we will want to spend lots of time visiting them. I have thought about retiring in about five years to spend more time with family, but we’ll see.
