Yvenna Yue and Craig Annandale’s combined skills have created a buying and selling machine in the Waikato region. It’s clear the power couple’s great relationship – both in business and in their personal lives – has not only got them to the top, but also kept them there.
Q: How did you get into real estate?
Yvenna: I had a couple of burger bars. It was really busy and my working hours were from about 8am until 10pm, and I did that for over 10 years. Then I got really bad tennis elbow and the doctor said you need to give up flipping burgers. So I asked everyone what I was good at and they said I was very good at selling. I was going to be a car salesperson but I couldn’t do the 6am starts, so decided to start selling houses in 2016.
Craig: I’ve always loved houses and when my parents moved when I was nine, I made them come home and draw me the floorplan of the houses they viewed when I was at school. I always thought real estate was an old person’s game and probably 15 years ago it was. It wasn’t until my brother’s father-in-law, Dennis Lloyd, an agent up in Whangarei, told me that the industry needed young blood. So when I started at 25, I was one of the two youngest agents in town. It was a big obstacle back then – in 2023 there’s a lot of young agents so it’s great.
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Yvenna: Some of them look 16!
Craig: Looking back there’s a lot but you don’t know when it comes to life experience and knowledge, so it was challenging but I made it through.
Q: What do you love about the job?
Craig: Every day is different but that also gives you the flexibility to live life your way. It becomes not just your job but your way of life, so you’ve gotta be used to the grind. I said to Yvenna the other day, "God, it’d be nice to have a day where I didn’t have to put on a suit!"
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Yvenna: For most people when they first start it’s the money. But the longer you’re in the industry it becomes about helping people. I like helping them into the house, out of the house, into the marriage, out of the marriage! You become friends with every vendor – everyone has a story. It’s interesting and really rewarding.
Q: You obviously make a great team.
Craig: We’re total opposites.
Yvenna: We never go to an appraisal together.
Craig: But that’s the big thing, some people will naturally gravitate to Yvenna because she’s business-focused and a lot more direct, I’m a lot softer in nature. What I’ve always found with the partnership thing is that there’s no perfect person, just like there’s no perfect real estate agent. So the benefit of a collaboration and a team is that you get different people’s strengths.
Yvenna: To do the volume you need a team. Everyone does their bit and it makes your job a little bit more relaxed. All real estate agents love talking to people but none of us like the paperwork or social media, so you need to separate these things.
Q: What’s your speciality?
Yvenna: We sell everything – even listings with a small commission that other listing agents won’t touch.
Craig: It’s a long-term thing, these people have other things to sell down the track.
Yvenna and Craig say team work is essential in their job. "To do the volume you need a team. Everyone does their bit and it makes your job a little bit more relaxed." Photo / Alan Gibson
Yvenna: And it’s word of mouth. To me it’s experience, and I like a challenge. We also take over a lot of listings that other agents couldn’t sell. We sit down, have a team meeting and think about what can we do to make it sell.
Craig: Essentially it always comes back to the three Ps. You can always pinpoint why these houses aren’t selling and it’s either price, presentation or promotion, and more often than not it’s the presentation. One thing that we offer our vendors is that we can get their house ready. We can put down new lawn, we’ve got painters, we’ve got sparkies and one of our team member’s daughter set up a staging business, so we can even offer special rates for staging.
Yvenna: We’ve sold a lot of our tradies’ houses. Our plumber had a plaster house that no one could sell and we took over and sold it. Another agent couldn’t sell our painter’s house either, they wanted $1.2m and we sold it for $1.45m. So we formed a long-term relationship.
Q: What do you guys do in your downtime?
Yvenna: We’re always selling! 24/7. Craig watches Netflix.
Craig: I like gardening. I think it’s the most underestimated area of the house that a lot of people don’t spend any money on. I also like Netflix.
Yvenna: I do like shopping. You’ve got to reward yourself! We made a rule that if we have a really successful auction day and sell three or four, we make sure we go out and celebrate – go out to a restaurant and have a glass of wine. If you stop rewarding yourself, you lose the passion. When people go shopping with me, they say, "Oh my god, you really love shopping."
"We made a rule that if we have a really successful auction day, we make sure we go out and celebrate." Photo / Alan Gibson
Craig: Now when we go on holiday it has to be a non-shopping destination. Like Fiji or an island holiday. If we go to a city, it ends up very expensive!
Yvenna: My dad always told me when I was young, if you don’t spend any money, you’re not going to make any. Rewarding yourself is really important in this game. It’s a very hard industry to motivate yourself.
Q: Any advice to agents starting out?
Yvenna: Make sure you’re passionate. Being money hungry is a good attitude, but if you’re only working towards the money or a ranking, you’ll eventually lose it. Lots of people are one or two-year wonders because they’re chasing the number. You need to find a sweet spot.
Craig: There are 300-odd agents in Hamilton and you need to work out why a seller should list with you. I call it the value add. What value can you offer a seller? Because if you’re going for a listing against three others, what makes you different? The industry is emotionally challenging. It’s not just the selling, it’s the rejection, it’s the getting told no - you’ve to be very strong to take all of that. You’ve also got to be prepared to ask the hard questions and have those very, very tough conversations – and do it with a smile on your face! So it’s a challenging job but it can be very rewarding.
Power rankings: The OneRoof Stats
No.2: Yvenna Yue
Agency: Harcourts, Hamilton
No. of listings: 224
Total value of listings: $203,314,000
Average value of listings: $907,652
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No.9: Craig Annandale
Agency: Harcourts, Hamilton
No. of listings: 196
Total value of listings: $179,025,000
Average value of listings: $913,393
* Data covers 12 months from August 2022 and based on listings on OneRoof for that period. Value of listings based on search price
