So you wanna be a Real Estate Super Star?

By Daniel Hayes

In the year 2010 Daniel Hayes earned a personal income of more than $900,000 after only 5 years working in Real Estate. He had never worked in sales anywhere before.

He has a year 10 education, lived in a Caravan as a kid, no business degrees and no formal training. He is also a staunch member of Alcoholics Anonymous and got clean and sober on the streets of Sydney at the tender age of 19!

This is the story of his journey in Real Estate, the ups and downs the trials and tribulations and there have been plenty of them, from the Number 1 Agent in the State, to various law suites he became entangled in, messy divorce and trying to be a good Father to his two beautiful kids Harry and Daisy, he holds nothing back. Compelling, authentic no bull shit reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vivid Publishing
• Release date: Jul 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781925341270

Daniel Hayes

Dr Dan Hayes is Associate Professor in the School of Forest Resources at the University of Maine. He teaches, does research and performs outreach on the use of remote sensing for forest inventory and ecosystem studies. He studies the role of climate change and disturbance in the dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems, with a focus on Arctic and Boreal regions. He has contributed to various regional, continental and global carbon budget modeling and synthesis efforts and publishes on the methods and results of multi-disciplinary, ecosystem-scale scientific investigations.

Book preview

ESTATE

Who am I?

In the year 2010 I earned a personal income of more than $900,000, after only 5 years in Real Estate. I had never worked in sales anywhere, ever before. The average commission in Geelong at this time was around $7,000. I have a Year 10 education, no degrees, and no formal business training. I’m a staunch member of AA and got clean and sober at age 19; my sobriety date is the 29th of November 1991. I still attend meetings weekly.

I have two kids Harry & Daisy who mean the world to me, and it has to be said, they’re awesome!!

I wrote this book myself. It’s not perfect but I finished it and it took me more than 2 years.

It is the story of my journey in Real Estate over the last 10 years, the ups and downs, trials and tribulations and there have been plenty of them. Like life, the book tells my truth, your truth and the truth. You be the judge.

So you wanna be a REAL ESTATE SUPERSTAR?

1

The decision to become a superstar AGENT

The year was 2004. I was 31 years old, sitting on the porch with my wife on a hot sunny day, just had my friend Craig over. As usual, he was gloating how he goes on a family holiday once a year, takes his kids to the Gold Coast!! I thought, WOW!! How the hell do you do that??? I was paying bills by the colour, red ones (disconnection) first! I was sitting there wondering how the hell we were gunna replace the bald tyres on the Hyundai!!

I just could never see the day where I could take my family on a holiday, not anywhere, ever!! I was always full of great money making ideas!!! I had tons of enthusiasm but it went nowhere…

I was sick of earning $50k a year as a drug and alcohol outreach worker. I was working my guts out! Shift work in Melbourne, 12 hour days, with sleep overs. It was killing me! Working with pregnant mums, with IV drug users taking methadone at the age of 15…this was not nice work!! Many of the kids I worked with died of overdoses or in car crashes. One girl I worked with, a working girl, was murdered at the age of 17. The police believed her body was dumped at the tip! I remember sitting at home watching it on the news, all these police at the tip scouring it, pulling it apart. To this day I believe they have never found her. It was tragic, sad. But that’s drug addiction, not too many happy stories in that line of work!!

Sometimes, while driving from Geelong up and down that bloody boring Melbourne road in my crappy Corolla, on the way home from night shift I would pull over and have a nap. I was so tired; I was always nodding off at the wheel. Lucky I wasn’t killed!! My biggest highlight on pay day was buying a can of paint. I loved painting, my house that is. I could paint a kids room out, or start on painting the outside of the home. It was great value for money; you could completely transform something for about $60!! It made me feel good.

Dirt Poverty

Mum and Dad worked their guts out to give us 3 kids a better life. Emigrating from England when I was 5, I can remember living in a hostel for a year when we first came here, and then we lived in a caravan in one of Mum and Dads friends’ back-yard in Whittington, the lowest socioeconomic area of Geelong. I remember it vividly. As kids, each morning before school my brother, sister and I couldn’t get out of the caravan because the owner of the home had his greyhounds out running laps around the van. It was always muddy and there was dog shit everywhere. Funny how you remember things, like this huge TV in the caravan, an old black and white one with a coat hanger as an aerial. It used to be right above my head where I was sleeping. I’d think, Jesus, if this thing falls on my head while I’m sleeping I am a dead kid!! It was half the size of the van.

After 12 months of living in the caravan, Mum and Dad saved up enough money to buy a 1950’s weatherboard in Belmont, and that is where I grew up. Both Mum and Dad had a great work ethic. Dad was a fitter and turner at Fords in Geelong, working all sorts of shift work and Mum worked as a process worker at Steggles Chicken factory.

Money was tight for us but we never really went without. Even though, to me, our fridge always seemed to have no food in it compared to the other kids’ fridges. In fact when I was allowed to go over to another kid’s house I used to steal food from their fridge. You would open the door and it was like opening the door to Coles supermarket!! There was a smorgasbord of food in there, everything neatly wrapped, colour co-ordinated! Chocolate, cake, Noddy’s soft drink!! God I wish my parents had an order for the Noddy’s soft drink each week!! Only the rich kids got that. Open our fridge: litre of milk that’s been watered down to make it last longer, left over food not wrapped, dog food can, lid opened not wrapped, can of tomatoes opened, rotten banana that’s been in there for 6 months…that’s about it!! If I went over to a kid’s house, I’d be offered water or maybe a soft drink. Come over to my house and you got offered an instant coffee. I’m pretty sure I was drinking it from about the age of 7, with 4 sugars in it, always 4 sugars, bit like a Mars bar really. I didn’t see a problem with that. I was a skinny kid and was always hungry!!

As a primary school kid, I was shorter than every one else and I always felt that I wasn’t good enough and, as stupid as it sounds, I always judged people on what runners they were wearing. You had a pair of Nikes on, you were a rich kid…we always had the Kmart specials on. I always had something to prove. I remember one day I rode on my bike, I was about 11 or 12 years old. I rode from my house across town, just to look in a sports store, about 3 hours it took me. I just wanted to look at all the runners in there. They lit up to me like Christmas tree lights for some reason. I used to think, If I could only buy a pair of those, if only my parents could afford a pair, I would fit in and all my problems would go away.

I also remember wearing Bell Bottoms to school. It wasn’t fancy dress either!! In summer, sometimes I would wear gumboots because my runners had worn out and I couldn’t get more because Mum hadn’t been paid yet. Sometimes I would even be sent to school wearing gumboots. There’s nothing wrong with wearing gumboots to school at all, except when it’s summer and it’s 42 degrees. Everyone knows a kid that wears gumboots to school, just like we all know a kid who used to piss his pants at school – you know the smelly kid!! Well, thank God I wasn’t the smelly kid (I don’t think I was?). I was the gumboot kid! Problem was, in the hot sun, the rubber used to melt to the hot asphalt, so sometimes I would be walking along and you would hear this noise like a slurping noise, slurp, slurp, slurp – yes that was the sound of my gumboots melting! I remember one time playing basketball as a kid, as I jumped up to shoot for a basket, my feet came out of my gumboots and the gumboots had set onto the asphalt, just stuck there with nobody in them…..me flying through the air with odd socks on, maybe just one sock, pretty embarrassing really."

High School

At Belmont High, I really struggled – I had a bad attitude and just found it really boring. I was an intense kid, today I would definitely have been prescribed Ritalin for ADHD. Back then the cure for ADHD was the strap!! My head was always out the window dreaming. Instead of thinking about what was written on the chalk board, my head was wondering what the chalk was made out of.

I was a smartarse, that’s for sure!! Sitting up the back of the classroom bored stupid, me and a couple of mates used to catch flies then tie a small bit of cotton around the fly’s back. One time we had 10 flies all flying around the classroom, each towing a piece of cotton, made everyone laugh! I really was the class clown.

The Navy and Alcoholism

I completed Year 10, just, and joined the Royal Australian Navy. This was a disaster! Within two years, I was in the drug and alcohol rehab. I almost drank myself to death, living in Kings Cross. Finally, I was sent again to long term rehab for 5 months and this is where I got sober.

At the age of 19, I was sitting in AA meetings all over Sydney. My last drink or drug was the 29th of November 1991. I remember it vividly. Without a friend in the world, I was placed on suicide watch at the HMAS Creswell base. I came to in the shower that morning drinking a can of VB. They thought I was going to neck myself the night before! I got changed into my whites, a particular type of naval uniform and walked with Lisa, my chaperone, towards the transport depot. It was about 500 metres from where I was sleeping. I had a can of opened VB in my pocket and I was taking swigs of it. It was about 7am. In my mind, I thought that Lisa couldn’t see me, like I was hiding it from her. I was still drunk, as usual. I got into the ambulance. I remember thinking, haven’t they got any cars to take me to the big hospital in Sydney? God they have to take me in an ambulance!! The reality was I couldn’t see how sick I had become, nature of the illness – you’re the last one to see how sick you really are and I was very sick, physically sick. I weighed just less than 50 kilos, hands shaking violently if I didn’t drink. I wouldn’t or couldn’t eat and spewed venom at anyone that came near me. I was in so much denial about my drinking; I just couldn’t imagine life without alcohol!! How would I ever have sex again? How could I communicate with the opposite sex?

I had no insight into my own behaviour either. I thought my ex-girlfriend was simply playing hard to get when she took out an intervention order on me!! She was terrified. I hated being in the Navy! I couldn’t handle being sober, couldn’t handle being drunk! Classic catch-22! Classic alcoholism!

Alcoholics Anonymous

I made it to 2 years sober. I was eating, sleeping and breathing Alcoholics Anonymous! I loved going to meetings, I did up to 20 a week. I was still in the Navy but I was trying