Leanne Pilkington still laughs about her first sale. A couple had driven past a house in Winston Hills in Sydney’s north-west and phoned the agency on the spot. As the junior in the office, she was sent out to meet them, and within minutes, they wanted to make an offer.
“They just said, ‘Yeah, we really like it. What do we do to make an offer?” she recalls.
“And I’m like, oh, sh*t – I need to write down the details.”
She didn’t have a pen, so she improvised: “I just used an eyeliner pencil and the back of my own business card and wrote down their details and their offer of $64,000. That’s how long ago it was,” she says.
“It was more shock, if I’m honest. I just didn’t expect it.”
It was a surprising start for someone who never wanted to be in real estate.
“I hated it. The last thing I ever wanted to do was be a real estate agent,” Leanne says.
“Dad made me work in the office from the time I was twelve, answering the phones on Sundays. I can still remember wanting to go to my girlfriend’s birthday at Luna Park, and Dad refused to let me.
“He said, ‘You’ve got to go to work.’ I was never allowed to have a day off.”
Her father, Peter, was a tough businessman, but when he fell seriously ill with glandular fever not long after opening his first office in 1974, her mother, Neryll, stepped in.
“She’d been a housewife since I was born and hadn’t worked for twelve years,” she explains.
“She had to step in and run the business while Dad was ill, and she discovered that she was actually really good at it. Dad eventually opened another business because they couldn’t work together, so Mum had her own office for a long time.”
From both parents, she absorbed lessons that still shape her.
“I literally got my work ethic from Mum and Dad. I’ve got about two years’ worth of sick leave owing because I just don’t take time off. You do what you say you’re going to do. The right thing is never the wrong thing. You do the right thing always … even if it’s not necessarily the right thing for you. For me, the right thing by the Laing+Simmons brand is the decision I’ll always make.”
Still determined to avoid sales, Pilkington studied valuation at UTS, driving into Ultimo three nights a week while working seven days in property management and sales.
“Four years later I qualified, but of course I was selling real estate by then … the dreaded thing I didn’t want to do,” she says.
There were detours along the way. From 1992 to 1995, she worked as a shopping centre manager, and that period was marred by behaviour that would be unthinkable now.
One day, she opened a parcel from head office and found a lingerie catalogue marked up by male colleagues with Post-it notes showing which models reminded them of her.
“When I rang to complain, I was told, ‘It’s a compliment, Leanne,’” she remembers.
Another boss crossed an even clearer line, massaging her shoulders late at night and moving to undo her suit jacket.
“Thankfully my brand-new husband rang just at that moment, and I used that as an excuse to leave.”
She resigned not long after, and by 1995 had joined Laing+Simmons.
Those first years weren’t easy – her then general manager would “come in at ten, read the paper till twelve, then go to lunch for the rest of the day” – but things changed dramatically when Tony Anderson and Rob Farrell bought the business in 1997.
“Tony was a really charismatic leader, a very successful real estate agent, a genuinely lovely man,” she says.
“He’d make proclamations, and I’d run around behind him making sure all those things happened. I was really happy being his number two.”
Her promotion to general manager came without ceremony.
“One day, Tony was on his way to go on holiday, walked past me and said, ‘You’re much better at this franchising sh*t than I am. I’m going to make you general manager. I’ll see you in a fortnight.’ That was it.”
Unsure how her franchisees would react, she rang them one by one.
“I thought they’d be disappointed. But they all said the same thing: we know how much you care about Laing+Simmons, how much you care about us, and how much you want our businesses to be successful. That was a real turning point for me.”
Even after that, she kept studying, completing her MBA part-time to back up her practical experience, and earlier this year, she added a Level 1 coaching certificate.
“I got a lot out of it,” she says. “It informs some of the way I communicate with business owners and salespeople now.”
Her management style is intentionally empowering, a conscious departure from the “do as I say” approach she grew up with in her father’s office.
She prefers to give people room to take ownership of their work and push forward with their own ideas.
“My team would say I don’t micromanage. I let them run. The most dangerous thing to say to me is, ‘I’ve got an idea.’ Because as soon as I think it’s good, it’s like, right, now what?”
Ownership came much later. By 2019, after Rob and Tony had sold, and Leanne found herself unhappy under the new corporate owners, re-assessing her career goals.
“I’m the kind of person who’s always thinking, what’s next? And I couldn’t see what was next,” she recalls.
An external job offer only made things clearer. “I just burst into tears. I said, ‘I can’t leave Laing+Simmons. I feel too responsible for all of the businesses, the business owners and the salespeople.’”
Some mentors advised her not to buy the business at 58, but her close group of “property girls” told her she absolutely could. Franchisees echoed that support.
“One of my mentors, when I told him what I was planning, just said, ‘No way, Leanne. What are you thinking? Don’t do it. It’s a big mistake.’ I really went into a depression for a couple of weeks because I had so much faith in him. But then I had this tribe of half a dozen girls who said, ‘Of course you can do this. You’ll be fantastic at it. It will be life-changing for all of you.’ They lifted me up and had more belief in me than I had in myself,” she said.
“Then, people kept saying, ‘If you’re in, I’m in.’ Some ended up with just one and a quarter per cent because so many wanted to invest. It blew me away. It was very humbling.”
The consortium completed the purchase in 2020. “It’s the best decision I ever made,” she says.
Through all of this, home life has anchored her. She has been married to Robert Blythman for 34 years.
“When I went back and did my MBA, I did nothing around the house. He did absolutely everything … the grocery shopping, the meals, the laundry. I couldn’t do what I do without him.”
Away from the boardroom, Leanne has built a reputation as one of the most stylish figures in the industry.
Bright colours, bold jackets and an eclectic mix have become part of her trademark — a far cry from the beige and navy uniforms of her early days.
Fashion, for her, is about having fun as much as making a statement.
During COVID she wore a different jacket for every daily Facebook Live update.
“By the end it was sequins. People said they didn’t even care about COVID, they just wanted to see what I was wearing.”
Asked about legacy, she resists the word.
“People often ask why I’ve spent so much time on the board of the Real Estate Institute. I say, because if good people don’t, where is the industry left? The industry has been really good to me and for me, and I want to help other people achieve great things within it.”
After 30 years with Laing+Simmons, she has no plans to slow down.
“I don’t have a retirement plan,” she says. “I will always be at Laing+Simmons.”
Stay tuned for Part II tomorrow: the story of how Leanne went from the only woman in the room to creating a national platform for women in real estate.
