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Taking the leap from mining to real estate was not a walk in the park for LJ Hooker agent Mitch Davidson, but the right timing and opportunity helped propel him as the seventh-ranked agent in REB’s Dealmakers 2021 – even at the height of the pandemic.
Selling 79 properties in just 52 weeks may trick people to assume that Mr Davidson started as a real estate hustler or that he’s operating in a hot market.
On the contrary, “I was working two full-time jobs,” he revealed. The market at Collie, Western Australia, where Mr Davidson is based, “was pretty quiet” at the time he joined LJ Hooker Property South West WA in 2014.
Back then, he was employed as an explosive technician working “four days on, four days off”. Having all things in order at home during days off, he found himself bored and thought of picking up his interest in real estate.
With the encouragement of principal Brent Spooner, he decided to do the course despite naysayers telling him taking on a second job would be impossible to pull off.
“I think that pushed me harder to do it,” he said.
In the early months of the pandemic, Mr Davidson and his wife welcomed their third child. It was the same time that things started to ramp up in the property market while he was on parental leave.
“Our inquiry from over east picked up, a lot of properties were bought sight unseen,” he recalled.
It was “a mix of everything”, Mr Davidson admitted. First home buyers were keen on jumping in, while locals were upsizing.
Eighteen months ago, with lockdowns looming, he and Mr Spooner wouldn’t have even expected the market to be this vibrant.
“We just had to ride it out,” they thought to themselves then.
At the height of the flurry of market activities, which Mr Davidson calls “the seven-year wave”, he and his wife decided he would finally make the switch to real estate full-time.
He never went back to his mining job after his parental leave.
“I always said it was about the right timing,” he quipped.
Mr Davidson found himself growing his team, onboarding a buyer’s representative, to keep up with the volume of inquiries they’ve been receiving.
Despite having been able to balance working at the mines and working in real estate full-time in the past, the transition to running his own agency was “a massive adjustment”, he admitted.
“The buck stops with you. You have to have that drive, and I definitely have that.”
Taking off from his career transition challenge, Mr Davidson disclosed the key to scaling his business: “You’ve got to have that passion for real estate.”
Mr Davidson commended his buyer’s representative Dakota, who started as a trainee, for sharing that passion which has enabled him to offload some work so he can spend time with his family.
Aside from the right timing, Mr Davidson also credited his success to having been “born and bred local”. With a good personal and professional network, he confessed: “Not going to lie, never, ever done a cold call in my life.”
Coming off the back of his recognition as one of the top dealmakers, can he see himself breaking his own records for the coming year?
“I’m happy to grow my team, do the same numbers and get a better family balance. I don’t want to be working all night and never see the kids,” he concluded.
Listen to the full interview here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Noemi Paminuan-Jara
Noemi is a journalist for Smart Property Investment and Real Estate Business. She has extensive experience writing for business, health, and education industries. Noemi is a contributing author of an abstract published by the American Public Health Association, and Best Practices in Emergency Pedagogical Methods in Germany. She shares ownership of the copyright of an instructional video for pharmacists when communicating with deaf patients. She attended De La Salle University where she obtained a double degree in Psychology and Marketing Management.
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