In 11 years Nicky Malloy and her team – which includes her husband Mark and daughter Georgia – have sold around $400 million worth of properties and racked up numerous awards, including being Harcourt’s top-selling West Auckland agent for eight years in a row. She’s thankful for the career she turned to after suffering terrible bad luck.
Q: What did you do before real estate?
Nicky: I had worked in the legal field for 10 years, doing a lot of property transactions. Mark, who was a sales executive for an international company, and I also set up a small machinery business that was going to be our retirement plan. Then the global financial crisis came along and we lost the business. We’d also had staff ripping us off. By the time we paid everyone we owed money to we had no debt, but we were left with nothing. We had to sell the house we had just finished building and move in with my parents. We had two small children at the time, and after 15 years of marriage, we were left with just change in our account.
Mark: After being grumpy for about six months I said to Nicky, “Look, we both come from nothing and we’ve made it once before, there’s no reason why we can’t do it again.” We went hard out and scrimped and saved and eventually managed to get together enough money for a deposit to buy another house.
Start your property search
Nicky: Before the GFC I’d been working part-time in the legal field but afterwards nobody was hiring and I couldn’t get work. The real estate agent we were dealing with said, “Why don’t you come and do real estate with us?” I’d never sold anything in my life – Mark was the one who was good at sales – but she said to me, “You’ve got people skills and a legal background, you’d be great.” What persuaded me was when she said you can work around the children. Georgia was seven and Spencer was just coming up to five. I got my licence at the end of 2009.
Q: Was it a tricky time to start a new career?
Mark: It was – a lot of real estate agents had left the industry because of the crunch, but we could see how we could do things differently.
Nicky: When we had to sell our house we had agents who lied to us, who would send over buyers and expect us to take them through the house ourselves. We both thought we could do much better than that.
Mark: With my background in sales and marketing I could see that a lot of the marketing was poor and I said to Nicky, “If you want to be successful at real estate, we have to make you stand out from the crowd. It’s all about profiling.”
Nicky: All of a sudden my face was on signboards and on our cars, which wasn’t really done at the time. I found that hard to start with because I am naturally quite shy.
Q: How did you feel the first time you saw your face everywhere?
Nicky: Horrified! I was embarrassed but I just had to overcome it. It’s been huge personal growth for me and a lot of things have pushed me out of my comfort zone. I’ve done keynote speaking to thousands of people at Harcourts conferences, and I’ve spoken at charity events, talking about succeeding in business after enduring hardship. Now it doesn’t faze me at all.
Q: Why did you move into the industry Mark?
Mark: The plan always was for me to get into real estate as well – I’ve always liked property. We wanted to grow the business to a certain level before I left my corporate job so it took about three years. Fortunately Nicky did really well really quickly.
The family thought they could real estate differently. Photo / Fiona Goodall
Nicky: Within the first year I had earned more than I would have working in law and then I doubled my income every year after that. I was working crazy hours but still managing to take the kids to school and pick them up. I got my dad, Vincent Williams, in to work with me – he had previously been in real estate – until he had health problems, then Mark and my mum Adrienne joined me. Mum had been made redundant and she came in as our PA. She’s now stepped back due to her health.
Mark: Getting Adrienne in was one of the best things we did. She’s been the glue of the business.
Q: And now Georgia has joined Team Malloy?
Georgia: I started last year. I grew up listening to my parents talking about real estate but they always said I should do my own thing. I planned to go to university to do a business degree and then maybe go into real estate later on. But I didn’t get into business school, even though I had been a top performing student academically all the way through school. So I did my real estate papers during Covid – I filed for them the day I turned 18. It’s gone really well – in my first six months I sold 18 houses.
Nicky: Georgia is very focused and driven, and mature for her age (19). First home buyers love working with her.
Georgia: My first sale was with a couple of first-time buyers who said they didn’t like real estate salespeople because they only worked for the vendor. I said I would work with them to get them the house they wanted. It was challenging but we got there.
Nicky: She loves being on the auction floor, working with buyers to help them with their bidding. She’s a machine.
Georgia: I love the thrill of it. I also love being able to help other newbies in the industry with what I have learned so far. I have had great business mentors in Nicky and Mark.
Q: What’s it like working with family?
Mark: It’s a blessing. We all get on so well. Business is business and family is family, and if we disagree at work – which doesn’t happen very often – it doesn’t affect family life.
Nicky: We do continue the real estate discussion when we get home – it’s hard not to.
Mark: Our son Spencer often comes with me to prep properties. We have a full-time maintenance person on our team but we will do things like mowing lawns and taking stuff to the tip, so he is involved too.
Q: What’s the secret of your success?
Nicky: Working hard – people don’t realise how many hours we put into it. And just offering good service.
Mark: Running it as a business with a proper business plan and a vision of where you are going.
Nicky: We give home sellers really good advice about how they can maximise the value of their home, often by doing simple things.
Mark: We will even tell people if we think it is better to hold off putting their home on the market for a while if we think that will maximise the value. We know that our vendors’ home is probably their largest asset and they have often spent a lot of their life paying it off. They can only sell it once so it is really important that we get every dollar for them that we can. The average family on two incomes raising kids finds it very difficult to save even $10,000 a year. So for every $10,000 more we can get for their property, it can put them years ahead of where they would have been.
Q: What do you do when you’re not working?
Nicky: It is really hard to get much time off, to be honest. We usually work seven days.
Mark: When we get the opportunity we like to travel. I do a bit of car racing, and we also do some off-road motorcycling. We like the outdoors so we do a bit of hunting. We enjoy getting involved with charities and helping good causes here and overseas. We’ve helped with humanitarian aid and things like that, and we’ve also helped out people here anonymously.
Nicky: It is really important for us to be able to help out where we can. We don’t take anything for granted, because we have come from nothing.
