At just 31, Christchurch’s Adam Heazlewood is about to hit half a billion dollars in real estate sales. He started young, joining Bayleys when he was just 20, and becoming one of their top agents in just a few years.
Q: Did you always want to work in real estate?
Pretty much. It has always been a passion for me. My parents were property investors and they dealt with a lot of agents. I was always impressed with Bayleys and their marketing, and the agents themselves who I found to be very relatable. In my second to last year at school we had to do two days of work experience and I spent those days with agents at Bayleys. I knew straight away it was what I wanted to do.
Just as I left school the global financial crisis hit and I decided to spend a couple of years working with my parents in that side of the property industry. It was an interesting awakening – a lot of people were hurting quite badly and I got to see that the property business doesn’t always go well.
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Q: What was it like being 20 in an industry where most of your colleagues are much older?
I was a very young-looking 20 year old and a fair bit of the time I did get people looking at me as if to say, “Are you really the agent?” It could be pretty daunting. I know there were listings I didn’t get because people thought I was too young, or too inexperienced. But any new agent will get that – vendors will usually go with someone who is a bit more of a sure bet.
But I treated it as a challenge and genuinely believed I could make it work. I thought just because there aren’t any young and successful agents here doesn’t mean it can’t be done. They have a lot of young agents in Australia and I watched videos some of them had done. One of the things that stuck with me was the idea that if you’re good enough, you’re old enough. I thought, If I can be really good, what difference does my age make? I emphasised that when I pitched to clients, and I earned their business.
Q: Did you start out on your own?
I worked with the top agent in our office at the time, Mark O’Loughlin, for about eight months, then when he went to another company I worked for 12 months with another top agent, Rosemarie de Jong, who has sadly since passed away. I learned a lot from them and picked up a lot of good skills. Eventually I felt it was the right time to go out on my own.
In my first full year on my own I made Bayleys’ Top Achiever status, which requires you to earn a certain amount in gross commission income. It’s a really high target and if you make it, you and your partner get taken overseas by the Bayleys family, all expenses paid.
Heazlewood says he put in hard yards early on. Photo / Kai Schwörer
I was the youngest person to ever make it, at the age of 24, and that gave me some momentum, and confidence. We went to Hawaii that year and since then my now wife and I have also been to the Maldives, Singapore, Vietnam and New York as a result of me being a top achiever. Bayleys have been really good to us.
Q: What’s the secret of your success?
I believe it is work ethic. That’s the one thing I see lacking from a lot of my generation. I work really hard. I did make a lot of sacrifices in terms of lifestyle in order to get where I am now. When I was in my early to mid-twenties, my friends were out having fun every weekend and doing the bare minimum in terms of work. Meanwhile, I was working seven days a week. I’d often be in the office until 7pm, go home for dinner then go back to the office to do things like printing off flyers. My friends would be going off on trips and I’d be working, and I would think, Is this worth it? But it has definitely paid off and I am glad now that I made those early sacrifices. Now I’ve got to the point where I can do a little bit less.
I realised after working like that for about six or seven years that you cannot run at 100% capacity all the time; it will catch up with you. Now I try to have a better balance. I try to have Friday afternoons off and put aside quality time to spend with my wife Danielle, who is also in real estate.
I also think having a passion for what you do is important, and I have a lot of positivity, energy and drive. And although I have now got a lot of experience, in many ways I still feel like I am just getting started. Every listing and every sale is still really exciting.
Q: Have you had any particularly memorable sales?
One that was very exciting was when I was 24. I had the buyer for a major development site in the CBD and I ended up selling it for $8.1m. That’s huge by Christchurch standards, even for today.
But to be honest, it’s not really the properties that stick with me, it’s the clients. I have met some great people and have been able to build some amazing relationships with a lot of my clients. Some of them have ended up becoming my best friends, such as people I’ve worked with who have building or development companies. That’s been really cool.
Heazlewood got his start in the real estate industry working with his parents, who are property investors. Photo / Kai Schwörer
Q: What do you enjoy most about the job?
Along with the people I get to meet, I would say there is a lot of personal satisfaction. I’ve always operated on the basis that if you put yourself second you come first. When you do what is best for your clients and you get a great result for them, that never gets old. We had a recent auction for a client who was moving to Nelson and they were feeling nervous because two other sales in their area had not gone so well due to these funny times in the market. They were worried that meant they would not get the price they were hoping for, and they were committed to selling because they’d bought another place. But it turned out that they got more than they were hoping for and they were delighted. It sounds like a cliché, but seeing their joy really did make me very happy and that’s the best part of the job.
Q: Have you bought and sold many homes of your own?
My wife Danielle and I have built two houses, and we sold the last one off-market to a buyer another agent had. The only time I have ever been through an open campaign was in 2020 when Danielle, who works with me, sold an investment property that a friend and I owned. It went extremely well, although I did wind her up saying the things you know will annoy agents.
Q: What’s it like working with your other half?
Good! We met at work seven years ago – she started out as a property manager but had always wanted to do sales and for about the last five and a half years she has been an agent working with me. She is exceptional at what she does. People often say, “How can you live and work together?” but we don’t know any different. We get on amazingly well as a team and pride ourselves on doing a good job.
Q: What do you do when you get time off?
Danielle’s family has a place at Lake Brunner [on the West Coast] and we love going there and doing water sports like wake surfing. I’m big into the outdoors so I enjoy doing things like fishing, hunting and motorbiking. The good thing about Christchurch is that everything – the beach, the mountains, the countryside – is only half an hour away.
