Nobody sees real estate agents making the beds

By Richard Hardie, founder, Hardie Property

It was the middle of a Cape Town heatwave and I was in Constantia Upper, on Belair Drive, clearing tea towels off a kitchen counter.

The property is remarkable. Two modern houses plus a cottage on four thousand square metres, with a slide that runs from the top swimming pool down into a dam at the bottom. It is not the kind of thing that comes up.

Bruce and I were there two hours before the photographer, and what we were actually doing was making beds. Clearing garden sacks. Skimming the pool, which Bruce is very good at. Moving cars off the driveway. Wiping the sweat off our foreheads and going round again.

That is the job. Nobody films that part.

People think this is glamorous

People think real estate agents turn up at a forty million Rand house and everything is ready to go.

And to be fair to the client, he had done his best. He genuinely had. But it was one man in a very large house, and people can tell you the place is ready when it isn't, not because they're being difficult but because they live there. It's a home. Homes have tea towels in them.

So we come in, we run around, and we make it perfect. We are quite fussy about it. There is a lot of work that goes into prepping a big house for the market and none of it looks like the version of this job that gets put on Instagram, including mine.

I'd rather be straight about that than pretend the glamour is the whole picture, because the people who suffer most from the myth are the ones who join the industry believing it. Nine out of ten will not last. It doesn't just happen. You've got to graft.

Why we bother with any of it

Because the alternative is visible from space.

Every listing gets professional photography. Video. Drone. Shot properly, portrait and landscape, because you have to think about all of those things now. It amazes me how many listings still don't have a video. Something goes up and it goes round my group of agents and everyone says: how on earth did that get put out to the market, and how did their company allow it?

I've watched this shift happen once already. When I started here in 2016, I can tell you now that ninety percent of photographs were taken by the agent on their own cell phone. I came in to Knight Frank and said no more, all of it goes professional. Within a year almost every company in this city was doing the same.

That's what staying ahead of the curve actually means. Not having a secret. Just seeing the thing, doing it, and watching everyone follow about twelve months later.

It costs money, obviously. Somebody is paying for that photographer and that videographer, and it is either you or the company you work for. That is a decision every agent has to make honestly, and a lot of them would rather not look at it.

The boring proof

We recently redid our marketing booklet, the one we take to valuations.

The old one was six pages. This one is forty. It is a real testament to the amount of business we've actually done, and it is the single most useful thing I can put in front of a seller, because it isn't a promise, it's a record.

Last year we also won an award for our marketing and went to Dubai to collect it, which was a very good day.

Sometimes I think I love marketing more than I love property. I'm not entirely joking.

Which brings me to the question I actually get asked

People ask me what I've sacrificed in order to have a successful business.

I always want to flip it round, because my problem isn't focusing too little on Hardie Property. My problem is that I spend a lot of time worrying about everything else as well. Is the house okay? Is the family okay? Are the dogs okay, which is genuinely the primary one for me. Are the two cats okay? Four dogs, two cats, two children, a husband, and a business, and I want all of those plates spinning at once.

You will hear a lot of people in this industry say that real estate is 24/7. You can absolutely allow it to be 24/7 if you want to. And you are going to burn out.

Being on top of it is the actual trick

Here's the part that sounds like a contradiction and isn't.

Staying on top of everything is what relaxes me. When we do a deal I want the VAT transferred into the right account. I want the provisional tax done. I want it all handled immediately so I know exactly where we stand. I cannot bear an inbox building up, so I deal with it, and that gives me genuine comfort, because if you leave it, it's a nightmare.

Same instinct, same house, same tea towels. The prep, the admin, the reconciling, the clearing: done straight away it costs you an hour. Left alone it costs you your evenings, and then it costs you your weekends, and then you are one of those people telling everyone the job is 24/7.

The agent who is always on is very often just the agent carrying a backlog.

So the graft and the balance are not opposites. The unglamorous half of this job, done properly and done immediately, is precisely what buys you the other half.

What the balance actually looks like

Gym first thing in the morning, with a personal trainer, because left to myself I would never push and I would certainly never do drop sets. Then an occasional cold plunge, which gives you an absurd amount of energy for the rest of the day.

Ten thousand steps minimum. My recent average is somewhere around twelve thousand two hundred. The dogs get two walks a day in winter because there's a bit more room in the diary.

And I'll be perfectly honest with you about those walks. On one of them last week I left three voice notes, answered four emails and took a call. I am always connected. I'm not going to sit here and claim I switch off properly, because I don't, and I'd be the first to say that isn't a model anyone should copy wholesale.

But there is a difference between being reachable and being consumed, and the difference is whether the work is under control or the work is chasing you.

Why I'm not running away to an island

I can see Table Mountain from outside this apartment. I can see Lion's Head. The ocean is that way.

We live in an amazing city and Cape Town is a complete "lifestyle city". I think you'd have to be quite ungrateful not to notice that on the mornings when it's all a bit much. Every so often I wonder what I'd do if I weren't doing this. Run away to an island somewhere? I did once spend a year on an island in Malaysia, living in the jungle, and there is a version of me that thinks about it, but not often.

Then I look out of the window.

Look, this is a pretty nice rat run to be in.

Onward and upward, and somebody needs to go and make those beds.

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