Success in real estate shouldn’t be measured by how much you earn, but by how much you keep.
In 1985, I was sitting at my desk in Neutral Bay in Sydney’s Lower North Shore, when I looked out the window and saw my boss getting into a Rolls-Royce. The week before, he’d been driving a Holden Commodore.
I remember sitting back in my chair and thinking: Paul, you just can’t do this anymore.
By this time I’d spent 13 years working for someone else. I was putting in the hours, generating business and creating income. There was nothing wrong with that, it was how I learned the industry. But in that moment, something became very clear to me.
I was helping build someone else’s wealth.
That realisation changed the direction of my life. Over the decades that followed, I owned five businesses. Some worked brilliantly. Others taught me expensive lessons.
I built a large agency that looked impressive from the outside: around 1,500 properties under management, 30 staff and all the trappings of a major operation.
But the costs went through the roof and swallowed too much of the income – sometimes all of it! This experience taught me a lesson I have repeated ever since:
It’s not how much you make that counts. It’s how much you get to keep after the expenses are paid.
Big revenue can look good. A big office can look good. A large team can look good. But none of those things, on their own, make a profitable business.
Years later, I went in the opposite direction. I ran smaller, leaner operations without the expensive shopfronts and overheads. It was simpler, easier to operate and far more profitable.
There was only one problem: as an independent competing against the big brands, it felt like being an island in an ocean.
Then my wife Annie asked a question that changed our lives. If a lean, low-cost agency worked so well, why not replicate it for other agents, adding the strength of a brand and keeping it economical?
That question became One Agency.
We built the model around a principle I still believe as strongly today as I did then: good real estate operators should be able to build successful businesses on their own terms and keep the rewards of their own hard work.
One predictable flat fee. No percentage of your success disappearing as you grow. Once that cost is covered, what you earn is yours.
Today, with over 700 personnel in more than 120 offices across four countries, we have proven that this model works. But for me, the recent transition of One Agency’s ownership to Mark Stewart, Matthew Crockett, Aaron Blackburn and Adam Martin is perhaps the most satisfying proof of that idea.
They didn’t come from outside our network. They came through it.
They joined One Agency as members, built successful businesses within the model and now, almost two decades after Annie and I started the group, they are its new custodians. There’s something wonderfully fitting about that.
One Agency was created to put more control in the hands of the people actually building real estate businesses. Now the future of the network is in the hands of four people who have lived that philosophy themselves.
As I step into a different chapter, my simple advice to agents and principals remains the same:
Don’t confuse turnover with wealth.
Don’t assume bigger means better.
Don’t give away more of your success than you need to.
Ask yourself the question that has guided so much of my career: ”How much of what I earn do I actually get to keep?”
Because the goal was never simply to earn more.
It was to earn more and keep more, and have the freedom to decide what comes next.
After two decades at the helm of One Agency, I am enormously proud that our future will be led by people who know it, believe in it and live it every day.
If you’re seeking greater independence and profitability, backed by an international brand with the tools and resources to support your success, I encourage you to experience One Agency for yourself.
For agents wanting to retain more of what they earn, and principals looking for more control over their business, I built our flat-fee model for you.