Property Talk

I love Property. For some reason it is in my blood. For the past 25 years I have been involved in the property market in different capacities. As a twenty-something year old I found myself working in Sydney, Australia as a builders labourer.

This was after having qualified with a B.BusSc. in Mathematical Economics and Business Finance (Hons) for UCT. As a young South African travelling around the world there was not a single country I was entitled to legally work, which made formal employment almost impossible but enlightened me to the informal sector of contracting and the supply of relatively cheap labour.

The first harsh realization was nobody valued my hard earned academic qualification and unless you were able to provide some level of value you were of little use to anybody. This was a time of character building.

The tasks I was employed to do as a "builders labourer" ranged from home renovations to office space demolishment - my favourite. There is something very therapeutic about being given a ten pound hammer and instructed to tear down dry-walling, ceilings and fittings.

Although this was the hardest physical work I have ever done - 11 hours a day for 6 days a week over a period of 3 months, it paid relatively well (cash of course) and tought me six important lessons:

1. Appreciation of manual labour. This can be intense and back-braking. When you are young you are bullet proof, but spare a thought for older labourers. These are tough people with grit.

2. The second lesson was the value of hard work. A "do it what it takes" attitude. There is no substitute.

3. The third lesson was the magic of teamwork. Where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts, the results follow. A team needs a leader that gets their hands dirty. A saying I relate to is that there are no bad teams - only bad leaders.

4. A clear sense of purpose is essential when the going gets tough - when you have to wake up in the dark, to get public transport to get to your place of work for the day, you need that compelling reason to drive you forward.

5. The fifth lesson was the importance of leveraging skills. Here I was - the most over-qualified builders labourer in Sydney at the time and my contractor employer was unaware of how to leverage the skill set of the motley crew I was part of.

We had only a single Australian in our team - which I understand why as I would also have avoided that level of intense work had I been legally employable.

This often makes me think of migrants and displaced people who search out greener pastures and end up working twice as hard as the locals in order to try and get ahead. I feel a deep sense of empathy for people who find themselves in that predicament.

6. The sixth lesson was humility. It is humbling when people have little or no regard for you other than what you can deliver for them.

This was probably the most important lesson. In a sales environment you are only as good as your last sale and that is why sales people, with realtors being my most admired kind, have to dust themselves off every day, step up to the plate and keep on swinging at the ball.