Oliver Lavers does the maths on everything now.
As a $5 million producer working ten hours daily, six days a week for 46 weeks annually, his time is worth $1,812 per hour.
That casual 30-minute coffee catch-up? That’s $906 of potential income.
“It’s expensive coffee,” he tells the audience of real estate agents gathered at AREC 2025.
The TRG Director wasn’t always calculating opportunity cost with such precision. Thirteen years ago, he borrowed money just to get around Sydney, earning $40,000 a year and working himself into the ground.
“I was waking up at 4:40 am straight to the gym, in the office all day calling nonstop, getting home like a zombie,” Lavers recounts.
“I was working six to seven days a week. Nothing else mattered besides work.”
The breaking point came in his boss Gavin’s office, when the relentless grind had finally worn him down.
“I had lost my why,” he admits.
“This is the bottom of the rollercoaster that no one posts on Instagram.”
But that breakdown became his breakthrough—not through some inspirational epiphany about chasing dreams, but through a much starker realisation about what he was desperate to avoid.
“I didn’t want to go back to Canada. I didn’t want to keep living week to week, worrying about paying for that $3 sushi roll,” he says.
“In that moment, I gave myself no choice but to succeed.”
The Lesson from Tragedy
The urgency around time came from watching his mother after both parents were diagnosed with cancer within weeks of each other when Lavers was 11.
His father died three weeks after diagnosis; while his mother, starting chemotherapy the same day, raised young children alone while working full-time as a doctor.
“No time off, no help, no cleaner, no gardeners, no tutor to help with homework—she did it all,” Lavers says.
“She showed me what relentless commitment really means.”
That lesson translates directly to how he approaches real estate now where every interaction compounds.
Recently, when Lavers sold a Cremorne Point property for $10.57 million, the purchaser needed to sell in Double Bay—which Lavers handled for $8.5 million. “
“You do the right thing for one vendor, they tell their friend; you sell their property, they tell their family.”
Beyond the Grind
But the transformation wasn’t just about working harder. Lavers struggled until he stopped trying to be someone else.
“I was not being me.
“It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to be me, define my own brand, my own point of difference, and got comfortable within myself—that’s when my career took off.”
He’s blunt about agents who don’t think strategically about their image. Scrolling through social media, he sees agents posting without purpose.
“Everything you do-every video you post, every flyer in someone’s letterbox, every email you send—is a representation of your brand,” he warns.
Lavers believes the industry’s notorious turnover rate comes down to one thing: agents whose “why” wasn’t strong enough to sustain them through the inevitable rejection and setbacks. Why endure hundreds of daily phone rejections? Why keep the phone attached during family holidays? Why give clients everything and come home to loved ones with whatever energy remains?
“When your why becomes clear, your how becomes a lot more doable, and your commitment becomes unbreakable,” Lavers says.
For agents at any stage—”chapter one or chapter ten”—the rollercoaster never stops. Success comes from learning to ride it better, tracking numbers religiously, and never forgetting that core motivation that pulled them through their lowest moments.
The calculation that once seemed impossible—turning $40,000 struggling years into million-dollar transactions—becomes inevitable when every decision is filtered through that unshakeable why.
The rest, as he puts it, is just mathematics.
