Husband and wife team Gary and Vicki Wallace are two of Bayleys’ top real estate salespeople, with well over $1 billion in sales to their names in just under 20 years in the industry. Now two of their sons, Sam, 36, and Andrew, 32, work with them selling luxury homes in and around Remuera and the Eastern Bays, while middle son Ben, 34, is Bayley’s top commercial leasing agent. But real estate wasn’t always the obvious career path for the Wallace boys.
Q: Did you grow up talking real estate around the dinner table?
Andrew: I was 11 when they went into real estate so it was after then but it did get talked about a lot.
Vicki: My dad, Vlad Cacala, was an architect and the boys would go to different sites he was working on and he’d talk to them about property and construction, so they grew up with that.
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Andrew: We could see the lifestyle real estate gave mum and dad and what they got out of it. But also how hard they worked.
Q: Did you all go straight into real estate?
Sam: I went into advertising and ended up working in Paris, after going there to meet a friend I’d made during a university exchange in Amsterdam. When I got there he’d left France to go to Germany but I ended up eventually getting a job with an international advertising agency in Paris. They had English-speaking clients and needed someone with good English to look after their Pepsi account. I didn’t speak French before I went but I learned quite quickly and once I got better, I got some local accounts. But I never really felt comfortable selling ideas in a different language.
Q: What was living in Paris like?
Sam: Incredible. It’s an amazing place, the lifestyle is quite different to New Zealand. The local bar becomes your living room, the restaurants are your kitchen. It was great. But after four years I jumped to Australia where I worked in advertising in Sydney. I got sick of it after a while, being chained to a desk and having no flexibility. And you are at the whim of your clients – you work on a process for six months and it goes to the client and they say this is wrong so you spend the next four weeks in a spin trying to re-do everything you spent the last six months doing. I wanted to take back some control.
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Mum and dad suggested I try real estate and then I bumped into a friend of a friend who worked for a commercial agency and told him I was thinking about getting into real estate. He said he’d give me a call and I thought, ‘No you won’t, you’ve had a few beers, you won’t remember this conversation’. But he did and I went to work for them in commercial and industrial sales.
I came back to New Zealand earlier this year and now I am working for Bayleys in residential with mum and dad. I had been working for Savills in Australia and they said they could put me in touch with people in New Zealand. I said, ‘No thanks, there’s no way I couldn’t work with my family’. I’d have to change my last name.
Q: Who went into real estate first?
Ben: That would be me. But I actually planned on being a golfer. After university I was travelling around playing golf and I thought that was my future.
Gary: He was very good. He’d been the captain of the New Zealand junior team and on the New Zealand team with Ryan Fox and Lydia Ko.
Ben: Then I had to have surgery for a shoulder injury and deep down I didn’t think I was good enough to make a go of it. I stopped playing but had no idea what I was going to do next, I’d only ever seen myself playing golf. So when Sam went to France, I went with him. We did the ski season there for five months, to find ourselves.
Sam: It didn’t work – it took me 10 years to find myself!
Ben: Sam then got the job in Paris because he had advertising experience but I had done nothing but golf, so I came home. Mum and dad suggested I talked to David Bayley from Bayleys about being in real estate so I did, and I thought I might as well give it a go.
"The good thing about working with your family is that you can say what you really think and someone can call you out and it’s like water off a duck’s back." Photo / Fiona Goodall
Gary: He went into commercial leasing because it is a good place to start when you are young. It’s hard for a young person starting out in residential because vendors generally want to go with someone with experience. But if you have a commercial building you need to lease, you will speak to anyone who can get you a potential tenant. Ben’s done very well – he’s been Bayleys’ number one leasing agent in New Zealand for the last seven years.
Ben: Commercial was good for me because after being so absorbed in golf for years I wanted a job with balance, where I didn’t have to work weekends and evenings like you do in residential. I found some of the things I had used in golf stood me in good stead, like having focus and dedication and work ethic. I really enjoyed it and pretty much hit the ground running.
Q: Andrew, what made you choose real estate?
Andrew: I just always knew I wanted to do it, from seeing what mum and dad did. I loved the lifestyle and getting to work for yourself. I’m a big people person so getting to meet new people every day excited me. I did Bachelor of Commerce and Property degrees at Auckland University and I also went into commercial first. It’s a good place to cut your teeth. I got into the sales side of it thanks to my mentor, Cameron Melhuish at Bayleys, and really enjoyed the nitty-gritty of negotiation. But I always knew I wanted to get into residential and work with mum and dad. I wanted to learn from them. They have built up such an incredible brand and I love the way they do things. And I thought that one day, when they stop working, it would be such a shame for that brand to die. I wanted to carry that on.
Q: People who follow their parents into the same line of work often get saddled with the “nepo baby” tag, especially if they’re successful. Is that something you’ve had to deal with?
Sam: We look at it from the point of view that we really respect what mum and dad have achieved over the years and we wanted to do it too. Like Andrew says, we’d like to be in the position where one day we can take over and continue with what they’ve established. If they had a family business making products, people wouldn’t think twice about the next generation following in their footsteps. Plus we’ve come into it with experience and skills we’ve learned in other fields and used those to help us grow.
Gary: They’ve learned from us but they’ve had to prove themselves. There has been no free ride. There is no guarantee in this business but it’s very rewarding for us to see them all making their own ways.
Vicki: They’ve all worked hard and they’re incredible at what they do. We hear amazing comments about how well they are doing, which is lovely. We’re very proud.
Gary: It’s nice to have a family business within a bigger family business. Bayleys have an amazing business built on family values and we try to do the same thing.
Q: Do you ever have disagreements?
Sam: Not really. We might say something someone else doesn’t agree with but the good thing about working with your family is that you can say what you really think and someone can call you out and it’s like water off a duck’s back. You just move on.
Gary: There’s a lot of honesty in our conversations.
Andrew: We can say anything to each other. We’re very close. People say to me, ‘How can you work with your parents’, but I love it. And Ben and Sam are my best mates. We like each other’s company. Sam lives two doors down from me and Ben lives 40m away over the back fence.
Q: What do you do when you are not working?
Ben: We’re all into golf. We’re very competitive on the golf course.
Gary: My other passion is thoroughbred horses – I breed them, rear them, race them and sell them. The boys have a lot of interest in that as well.
Vicki: The boys are all into health and fitness, so that’s always part of their day. And we just like spending time together. Our boys have three amazing partners and now we have two lovely grandchildren [Sam’s son Jude and Andrew’s daughter Ophelia]. We’re seriously blessed.
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