Boutique on purpose, driven by a team of high-achievers

By Richard Hardie, founder, Hardie Property

Compiled from: Dear Cape Town Documentary - Official Episode @hardieproperty; The Camps Bay Guy podcast

I started this business sitting in my entrance hall, in lockdown, fully expecting to be the only person who ever worked for it.

That isn't false modesty. I had no plan for a team. I built the brand and the website first, which is arguably backwards, and then it occurred to me that I should probably tell some people I'd been doing all of this. We weren't allowed out of our houses anyway. The moment agents were told we could start doing viewings again, I put up a post saying: right, this is what I've been up to.

My biggest fear was that I didn't know enough people. Cape Town is a city where it's about who you know, and I'd been away a long time. I did my first deal in six days. I didn't even have an agreement of sale, so I phoned an agent friend and asked to borrow the structure of hers.

Six and a half years later there are eleven of us. Not one of them was recruited, and every single one arrived with a career already behind them. Those two facts are the whole business, and they are much more connected than they look.

The name on the door

Hardie was my father's surname.

He was in the British diplomatic service and ended his career as a High Commissioner. He never got to see me come back to South Africa, and he never got to see me set up a company. I loved him, I adored him, I respected him, and putting his name above the door was the only version of this that made sense to me.

It also raises the stakes considerably. The success of Hardie Property matters to me because it is my name, and there is nowhere to hide behind a corporate one.

Nobody here was recruited

Shauni came first, and she'll have been with me for six years shortly.

She'd spent 26 years in financial services and had lost her love for it. She saw something I posted on Instagram at half six one morning and I had her CV by twenty past four that afternoon. I'm still slightly amazed by that.

Linda Gibson and Lyndsay Child came from a much bigger agency, one I used to run, and wanted something smaller. It was such a pleasure to bring them on board as I knew them well and their work ethic is infectious.

Then Bruce Darne phoned me one day and asked if we could meet. He'd been a client of mine, him and his wife, and he'd spent 24 years running a company that looks after twenty non-profit organisations. During Covid he worked out he no longer needed to be part of it. He told his wife on a Sunday afternoon that he was going to go and sell property. She had a bit of a giggle in the kitchen.

Jodi van Embden and Monica Kruger came to the Atlantic Seaboard team about three years ago from a very big corporate, global agency. They wanted a more boutique working environment and loved Hardie Property's energy.

I've never once approached someone and asked them to join. Everyone who works for Hardie Property came here on their own steam, and I think that matters more than any recruitment process I could have designed.

Four minutes, or three days

I gave Bruce about four minutes.

He sat down, told me what he wanted to do, and I said yes, I think this can work. Because for an agent it's about personality and it's about people, and I already knew him and his wife, and he is very charming and very good with people. He had a contract that night. Four years in he'll tell you the same thing I would: it's a people's job, and it's all about actually listening to what someone needs.

Shauni's took three days.

Different role, completely different problem. Selling is a personality question, and you can read that in one meeting. A PA is a trust question, and you cannot read that in one meeting at all. You're integrating someone right into the middle of your business, into the finances, into the client relationships, into everything. So I needed to see her with clients, under a bit of pressure, more than once, before I could honestly say I knew.

Four minutes and three days, from the same person, in the same year. That isn't inconsistency. It's the two different things you're actually assessing.

Everyone had a career before this one

This is the part I'd want anyone thinking about joining a small agency to understand.

26 years in financial services. 24 years running a company. 30 years in advertising and media before Linda ever sold a house. Jodi and Monica coming off the Seaboard with their own book and their own reputations. Nobody at Hardie Property is learning how to work here. They learned that somewhere else, usually somewhere hard, and they arrived already knowing how to hold a client, run a week and deliver on something without being chased.

Which is why we don't have Monday meetings

We don't have a weekly meeting. We don't have weekly training.

I say the same thing to everyone who joins: you've got to be your own boss. You do your own thing. If we want to meet up we'll have breakfast, or a glass of wine, or we'll see each other in training when there's actually something to train on. Otherwise you get on with selling and valuing and making money, and I get on with mine, because I love being an agent and it's the first time in my career I've been able to just do it.

That model sounds very relaxed and it absolutely isn't for everybody. If you need a desk manager and a structure and someone setting your targets, this is the wrong agency and you should go somewhere bigger, with no hard feelings from me.

But it only works at all because of the paragraph above. You cannot run a business with no management layer unless everyone in it has already managed something.

The other half of that deal is that nobody is fenced in. None of us has any restriction on where we can work, so we cover all the prime areas of Cape Town. Linda works the Southern Suburbs and is now getting onto the City side as well. Team Hardie has the Atlantic Seaboard. Nobody is told no.

The December challenge

Shauni started this, and she's regretted it ever since.

Around the 20th of November one year she said to me: I've got a challenge for you. Sell five properties before the 22nd of December, when the office closes.

I sold seven.

When Linda and Lyndsay joined in 2022 we put the challenge out to the whole team. I won that one too, and Linda was sitting in the room when I said it. I didn’t win the competition in 2025 however. Kudos to Bruce, Monica and Jodi for winning jointly. 2026 here he come!

That's about as close as we get to a performance framework, and honestly it tells you more about how this place runs than any values document would.

Small is not the same as local

The last house I sold in Hout Bay, the owners chose us because they wanted an agent with more reach.

They wanted someone who works all areas of Cape Town, who has international reach, and who thinks outside the box on marketing, rather than an agent tied to one suburb. I'm not knocking local agents at all, but they do tend to be very centric to that one spot, and our buyers come from everywhere.

I spent ten days in London recently with our international brokers, with lawyers who know me from the eight years I lived there, and with finance contacts. That network comes back to Cape Town with me, and Cape Town goes back to London. For a boutique agency at the bottom of Africa, that international element is close to the whole point.

Being small was a choice. Being small-minded about where the buyers come from would be a completely different one.

And no, there's no ten-year plan

People ask what the vision is and I never have a good answer.

We don't have a crazy vision to be a big corporate. That's not what we want. We enjoy being small and it works incredibly well. We doubled our revenue last year, which I'm very proud of, and we'd been growing at around 50% a year before that, so there is no argument that staying small has cost us anything.

I'll be honest though. Every so often I do lie awake wondering what happens if we stop selling things, and I've had the odd panic attack about it at two in the morning. Anyone who runs their own business and tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.

Then I get up, go to the gym, and go and do it again. Onward and upward.

Richard Hardie is the founder of Hardie Property, a boutique agency operating across the prime areas of Cape Town.