Our recent interview with Donna and Cindy Smith – two of the owners of Harcourts Meander Valley a Deloraine real estate agency.
Donna Smith: Cindy’s a business owner with Daryl and I. She’s the quiet, sort of behind the scenes person.
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We’re both named Smith, but we’re not any relation! Daryl and I owned the office first and then Cindy used to work for us and then basically we decided we needed someone else to take on all the staff management and the book work.
So, that was Cindy. She does all non-out-there parts of the business. So we take all the glory and she sits right there and does all the work while we drive around the countryside.
Matt Taylor: There’s new people who are starting to work here as well?
Donna Smith: Yeah, we’re growing the business. So this year basically we’ve ventured out and we’ve got three sales consultants, which we’ve only had for the last 12 months, would be 12 to 18 months.
So the story there is obviously Jayden and Tyneke. And then we’ve got Rachel. And then Daryl and I have two PAs, and they work behind the scenes as well. And then Cindy has a young girl helping her as well with property management and everything else.
But you don’t really see any of those people, because out the back we’ve got another sort of four people.
Jayden’s coming from a plumbing background and Tyneke from hairdressing. That’s worked really well. Rachel owns the Mole Creek Cabins as well.
So we’re all busy.
Matt Taylor: Can you talk a little bit about the business and where it covers?
Cindy Smith: Well, we’ve basically got the biggest franchise area in the Harcourts group in Tassie. Our area stretches from the Hadspen bridge all the way up to Sassafras and then expands out from there as well. We try and stay inside our franchise area as much as we can, but obviously from time to time we do cross borders and that comes at a little penalty to us. But if we’ve got family or friends in those areas, we can go into those areas.
Donna Smith: And probably between the five of us, we struggle to cover that entire area. By the time you go to Liffey and show a property in the morning and then Rosevale in the afternoon…
So, ideally we’d like another sales consultant out Carrick way would be really good. Because there’s plenty of area out there that we could cover.
Matt Taylor: Can you talk about how you ended up in real estate yourselves?
Donna Smith: I started out as a hairdresser. Basically, I owned both the salons in Deloraine and decided I was retiring so I went home, started retirement and did all the ironing and the cooking, got bored, got a call from Ralph Heffernan. I started in this office and now we’re back in the office again!
So I started with First National. He rang me one day and said, Are you interested in a job? I said, “I’m not sure, I’ll come in and have a chat.” So I came in, started the next week and went from there. And then Daryl came in basically about six months later. And then in that process during that period we got offered to buy a franchise of Harcourts in the area, so we stepped into that.
And we’ve been here 16? 16 years in Harcourts in the area. Then Cindy was a beautiful employee, and your journey is what?
Cindy Smith: I was, in banking for probably about 17 years. Started off next door when it was the ANZ and then moved into Launceston. Then took a redundancy there because my job was farmed out to Melbourne.
So, then I moved up the road to Westpac at King’s Meadows, I worked in several different branches across Westpac in Tassie. And then took a redundancy because my job role changed and wasn’t happy with the way it was all going. So I took a redundancy and ended up here. Down here at the Bendigo Community Bank, which was a bit of a culture shock for me after working for a big bank.
And then I found out that Donna and Daryl were looking for somebody. And I’ve been there ever since
Donna Smith: I was gonna say 11 on 12 years here. And then eventually we brought Cindy on as a business owner. Since then we’ve sold the business once to someone else and Cindy stayed in and then we’ve brought our part back again. That was two and a half years ago. So we had another retirement, but we’ve come back. But the next one is it – that’s final!
Matt Taylor: What are some of the highlights of your job?
Donna Smith: For me, probably meeting and greeting people. It’s very similar to hairdressing. I like people.
So I suppose you get to go out with people and talk to them. I also like the fact that we’ve been able to uphold standards with our business. It’s, in my opinion, a very professional business. So I’ve had to slightly lapse on that a little bit with Jayden, who’s decided that he doesn’t want to wear a tie because we’re very corporate based.
So we had a little chat about it and I said, okay, that’s fine, don’t wear a tie. It’s working well for him, so now it’s working for us. For me, I just enjoy people, I suppose. People management – and I just like to be out and about. It’s a very easy job in the sense that you can be very flexible with your time.
Can I just say something, poor Cindy works seven days a week. Sometimes she’s in here at eight o’clock at night when we’re at home relaxing!
Cindy Smith: I don’t know, I suppose it’s very similar to banking, because I do all the financial bits and pieces and I enjoy doing that sort of thing.
Staff management… some days I enjoy it, some days I don’t. It is a bit flexible. Donna and I can sort of work between each other and we head off and do a few bits and pieces of our own and it’s pretty flexible. I get to meet lots of interesting people and see lots of interesting places.
Donna Smith: Overall, we’ve got good staff, really. We’ve got a real mix of staff and very, very different personalities. So that’s sometimes difficult in a corporate structure. But here it gels well. So if someone comes in and they want to lease their house and we think it’s going to be better suited to Jayden, then Jayden will get it.
If it’s going to be very suited to Rachel, then they’ll take it on. So it works well in that sort of sense. Rachel’s got a very strong outgoing personality. Jayden’s very laid back and sort of very easy care sort of thing.
Tyneke’s, I don’t know, she’s just an all rounder, really, isn’t she? She’s very flexible. So, and I suppose when someone comes in or inquires, we ask if they’ve got an agent in mind and if they don’t, then we’ll pass it out to whoever we think’s going to gel the best with that person.
And it mainly just comes down to personality. That’s basically it.
Matt Taylor: You mentioned some of the challenges before. What are some of the challenges that you find?
Donna Smith: We thought COVID was going to be a challenge. Daryl and I, we’ve got accommodation and real estate, so we thought “this is not good.“
But both of them went the complete opposite. So basically real estate went crazy but with Tasmanians. So Tasmanians decided they were going to move around the state rather than staying where they were. So that was really good. Challenges for us at the moment are interest rate rises, obviously.
And probably just a lot of the media is talking about. I suppose cities instead of country. So we struggle with that when they say that prices are dropping in Hobart, prices are dropping. It’s not relevant to the Meander Valley really. Mainly our market’s 80 percent mainland people.
So we find that they just keep coming.
Matt Taylor: In terms of purchasing property, it’s 80 percent mainlanders?
Donna Smith: Yeah. So it’s interesting. We probably have only 20 percent local turnaround? Generally when we’re out with people, it’s interesting because they’re looking here in the Meander Valley or the Huon Valley.
So if they’ve chosen a country sort of place, that’s the two areas that they’re looking at.
Lifestyle, I think, and just the community based sort of thing. So that’s what it seems to be. And I suppose because our area is so big we’ve got lifestyle properties that they’re looking for. Really small acreage.
Matt Taylor:
Is there any advice that you would give to people
Donna Smith: if someone was buying in the area, obviously in Tasmania, still buy, beware. So other states, obviously we’re originally from the mainland, but people will already have a building inspection done, have all their, you know, things met with council and things.
Here, it’s a bit unstructured and it’s up to purchasers to do their own building inspection, to pay for it. to go to council, check out the records, and then it’ll become part of their conveyancing process. So I can probably just say, choose an agent you feel comfortable with, although the agent works for the vendor.
They’re under an obligation under the Act to disclose anything they know about a property. So just ask a lot of questions when you go to look at a property. We we have a lot of people now who buy property sight unseen through video. Walkthroughs that seems to become a lot more popular, doesn’t it?
So we, we are doing a lot of those before people come.
Matt Taylor: And you mentioned that if it’s 80% mainlanders that, have potentially come lifestyle properties, were there specific things that they were looking for in properties
Donna Smith: Of course a river, a mountain view. Acreage. Every time, and they very, very rarely come up. We’ve obviously got a database so it gets fed out to our database before it goes live. So sometimes we’ve actually got purchasers for properties before it’s on the internet. Everyone wants the three things, river, mountains, lifestyle.
Matt Taylor: In terms of like double glazing and comfortable homes, is that much of a consideration or is that more once you arrive and then you work it out?
Donna Smith: Yeah, no, and you find that most people have sort of put aside money to do that, like renos and things. In my eyes, when I go out now, it’s very hard to find a property, a lot of people are looking around that $500k – $550k range, and we’re struggling to get properties now around that, that are lifestyle properties out of town. So that’s really hard, isn’t it?
Matt Taylor: Can you talk about any of the more memorable properties that you’ve seen?
Donna Smith: We’ve just sold one recently at Weegena, which was total river frontage on the Mersey River.
Mud brick property, beautiful river flats. And because anyone would buy that at any other time, but of course there was floods in the mainland and on the media in the mainland. So every time someone looked at it, there were no floods, but that was just sort of something that happened.
We’ve sold lots of properties. I don’t know how many we’ve sold. I reckon we’ve probably sold nearly 300 properties over the course of the last, probably 10 years and more. Gee, there’s so many. Personally, I’d rather show a small alternate property. Like I love going to Wiiteena at Jackie’s Marsh and showing properties than a big luxurious one.
Even though we do list those sometimes they’re a long, hard sell. So I think sometimes as a sales consultant, you’re better off having two or three smaller ones and concentrating on those than the large lifestyle ones. Jayden’s just got a beautiful property coming up at, is it Dunorlan?
Yes. So it’s a large farm. I think it’s 500 acres three houses. So that’s very exciting for him as a new agent.
Matt Taylor: Some people have negative ideas about real estate agents. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Cindy Smith: Well, I suppose, we always try and be professional, make sure that we disclose everything that we’re meant to disclose and, and act in a professional manner and make sure that we abide by all the rules and regulations.
So, you know, we can only do what we we’ve got control over, not what other agents do or anything like that. So we can only try and be professional and uphold our professional, attitude and everything.
Donna Smith: Yeah, and I think with Harcourts too, we’re very strict about training, so you won’t come into this office and be sent away with a contract for you to fill in.
So the agents all know how to go through contracts they’ll sit down with you, they’ll go to your house and sit down, so basically part of our ethos is doing the right thing, we encourage our agents to disclose everything about the house because they’ll only come back to bite you anyway. And they’re all trained, we do regular training every quarter – on everything including contracts. There’s just been changing contracts at the moment. So every Wednesday we’ll have a staff meeting. We’ll run through something that’s relevant for training,
Matt Taylor: How do you see the industry changing?
Donna Smith: Ideally, we’re probably a little bit old fashioned here still, because we’ve got properties in the window, whereas a lot of agents don’t. A lot of it is changing now. You don’t come in and speak to someone about houses. We’re happy to do that, but people just don’t do it. They just do everything off the internet.
Sometimes I’m like, why do people do that? They’ll send three emails instead of just picking up the phone. And they don’t understand that some days I might get, I don’t know, 50 to 100 emails on a property. I don’t want to spend all my day doing email, so I may not get back to someone for three or four days.
Yet they’ll send three or four more emails instead of just picking up the phone and saying, “look, we want to look at this property.” So that’s the hardest thing that I’ve had to learn to deal with. And probably just text messaging and that sort of thing – and social media messages rather than phone calls.
Cindy Smith: I suppose technology since I’ve been in the industry. It’s really sort of, taking over the industry a lot more. Even with property management now, when we go out and do reports, we’ve got these new little cameras that take a 360 degree photo of the room, and it just makes life so much easier in property management when you’re going out to do things like that.
So there’s lots of little technical things that are happening behind the scenes that just help, our day to day,
Donna Smith: But we’re forced towards that now because it’s so competitive. So you have to keep up with technology. You have to have professional photos. Otherwise, you just don’t get the listings.
Matt Taylor: Can you talk about the process of valuing the property?
Donna Smith: So when I go out to do an appraisal there’s, I suppose there’s two values to a property really. There’s a market value and obviously a bricks and mortar value. Basically we’ll go out, we’ll do a walkthrough, we’ll come back, and we’ll talk to the owners or sometimes it’s an estate. Then we’ll come back to the office and we have what’s called a summarisation calculator.
I don’t think a lot of offices do it, but we’ll summarise what the actual house size is, what it’s worth a square, what the block’s worth, any improvements, landscaping and things like that. And then we’ll do market comparisons. So, a lot of people that we go out to visit will say, Oh, this property’s on the market for X amount, so ours should be worth this.
And we have to explain it, then we’re not really interested in what’s on the market, it’s only what’s sold. So that’s what’s relevant to the sales results. I suppose for us, we then take the appraisal back We always say to the client that it’s obviously their choice. We’re there for a guide on what they want to price their property for, but we’re not going to price, list something that’s absolutely stupid because it would take too long to sell.
But it’s also interesting nowadays because the market’s a little bit unknown because it just depends who’s out there. Like a buyer really guides the price. So that’s how we do it. So we give a discussion about an option whose price is it or do we band together and work out something and then we’ll put it up for sale.
So we don’t take it on what’s on the market, it’s always sold properties and basically bricks and mortar what it’s worth and what the land’s worth. Property management’s a little bit more difficult.
Cindy Smith: Well, it’s basically what’s been rented and what price they’ve been rented at and what their inclusions and all those sorts of things are in the property and what the demand is.
Obviously rental properties are really driven by demand, like the price. So during COVID the prices just skyrocketed because there was so much demand but it’s come back a bit now so everything’s leveled out so you can pretty well give it a reasonable appraisal and know that that’s what you’re going to get.
Matt Taylor: Are there specific things that people look for in a rental property?
Cindy Smith: Yes, pets, whether they have pets and I suppose the location – is it going to be a good commute to work? That’s where I think Deloraine is a really good area because we’re halfway between Launceston and Devonport, so if people are looking for that little bit of a lifestyle, they can commute either way.
If one of them works in Devonport, the other one works in Launceston, that’s a really good area for them. I think just something comfortable and we get all sorts. People that are just looking for something really basic and then we get people that are looking for something, a little bit upscale and upmarket too.
Donna Smith: We’ve probably got the largest property management at the moment in this area. It’s sort of the bane in my side sometimes because sales consultants never love property management, but property management is what holds the business all together.
So we’ve had to step back and, and I suppose thank property management at stages when sales is a bit quiet because it pays all the bills and pays the staff and things like that. So it’s an interesting concept. It takes up a lot of resources, but although you don’t think there’s a lot happening there – there is a lot happening.
And for example, we’ve just had all the frosts with the broken pipes and Cindy worked exceptionally hard on the weekend. Although we did some of it. But it’s a 24 hour thing.
In property management, there’s no stopping because if people don’t have power or they don’t have water they’re ringing up for an emergency situation. So it’s not something that stops when the doors close.
Matt Taylor: What do you think will happen with property values and the market over the next five years?
Donna Smith: In the Meander Valley area We’ve always stayed reasonably steady. So I can always say that when there’s a drop in the market, we’ve been able to hold fairly well. So COVID, obviously we went crazy and the market just grew and we were getting unheard of like 40 and 50 lots of people through open homes.
Now we’re back to maybe one to three lots of people through an open home. And sometimes none is realistic in the current market. I can’t see a drop. I can only see a growth in this area. We’ve just got too many mainland people coming that are selling properties in other areas and it’s still cheap here.
So Tasmania is still a cheap option. Hopefully interest rates will stay where they are because that seems to be a big factor at the moment. But everyone really wants a Tasmanian lifestyle. That’s what they’re coming for, a Tasmanian lifestyle really.
So some properties we’ve sold for people. I think we’ve got one client that originally we sold for from the mainland. And we’ve just sold them their sixth house. Pat and Anna, thank you! And they tell me this is their last one, but they say that every time. So we’ve got a lot of return customers now.
Matt Taylor: What sort of demographics are the people who are buying?
Donna Smith: Early retirees, I’d say. Not a lot of family transactions. We’ve got a fair base of investors who will buy and rent with plans to come in a few years when they retire. So we’ve probably got, I don’t know, a quarter of our rent roll?
That’s investors doing that. So often we’ll sell a property and then we’ll turn it over to the property management department. And it’ll stay a rental for three or four years. Some people will then move or some will change and it’ll be back on the market again. So the other thing is property management is a good feed into the sales as well
Matt Taylor: What’s your favourite part of Deloraine?
Cindy Smith: For me it’s the river and riverbank. It’s just beautiful.
Donna Smith: For me, home. I love being home. I don’t get to stay home very often. Like our job’s a seven day a week thing. And often we’re out till seven o’clock at night because most parties want to transact after hours. So, just home, the bush, yeah, I just like the native side of it.
Harcourts Meander Valley opening hours
The agency is open Monday-Friday from 9am to 5pm and is located at 60 Emu Bay Road Deloraine. Agents Donna (0419 622 552) and Daryl (0407 623 620) can be contacted for appointments.
