In late 2023, in the middle of a conversation about a market that was testing everybody, Chris Hanley OAM said something I’ve been thinking about ever since.
“But Samantha, I’ve never had a bad year in real estate and I’ve had more than 40 of them.”
From almost anyone else, that would be a flex. From Chris – Director and CEO of First National Byron Bay, and a man I’ve called one of the wise men of this industry on air more than once – it’s simply a report from the field.
His office has held around 30-40 per cent market share in the Byron postcode for more than 20 years. When the GFC cut sales in his patch roughly in half, his numbers went up, every year, while the market went backwards.
So with volumes lower, stock moving slower, and plenty of vendors wanting more than buyers are offering, it felt like the right time to go back through the archives.
Chris has sat down with me five times on the Elevate podcast between 2017 and 2023, plus a leadership session in 2018 that I’ve never stopped quoting. And there’s a reason I’ve been back in the archives – Chris and I have been planning something. More on that at the end.
As he told a room full of agents once, “We’re in the trust business. I’ve always been in the trust business. You’re in the trust business. Trust is information well explained. And trust, right now, is actually our currency.”
Every word below is his, as he said it. Here are 30 of the best.
On leading
1. Leadership is alchemy. Chris has sat in conference audiences for 30 years waiting for the one big idea that would change everything. It never came, and he now tells leaders to stop looking for it. “There is no formula for it. You are not going to get one from me or anybody else… You will work out your own path, and if it is any good, it will be completely different from the next person.”
2. There are only two honest measures of a leader. The first: “your profit and loss, because it doesn’t lie.” The second is one nobody else tracks – sick days. “Sick days are a measure of the culture within your business.” And when the numbers are bad? “It’s no one else’s fault, ever. Ever.”
3. Managing fear is in your job description. “If you’re a boss, understand that fear is all throughout your organisation right now, and it’s on your job description to keep everybody calm.” The word CALM is literally written on his desk – because vendors, buyers, and staff all follow the calmest person in the room.
4. Consistency beats brilliance. Citing Google’s research on what makes managers effective, Chris argues inconsistency is the real killer – and he takes it to a very Hanley conclusion. “You wanna be a good boss even if you’re a nutter? Just be consistently mad… Just be a nutter every day, and guess what your team will do? They’ll work out a way to adapt and work around you.”
5. Turbulence is normal, and it’s a good sign. “You’ve got to be comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s what being a leader is about… If you’re going into work every day and everything’s pretty cool and there’s no turbulence, trust me, you’re not running a good organisation.”
On language
6. Real estate is one long language game. Maybe his most quoted idea, and the one he’s been consistent on for a decade. “Real estate is one long language game, and I think we’ve got all the words wrong, like prospecting.” Prospecting, he says, is just talking to people.
7. Scripts and dialogues are beige. “If you wanna connect with another human being, you will never ever connect with another human being using scripts and dialogues. End of story. I don’t care how good the scripts and dialogues are, because it’s robotic. They’re not your words.” His alternative as a leader: “I’ve never had to tell anyone who’s worked for me, who’s been any good, what to say… I’m just more likely to tell them why.” He also says, “Scripts and dialogues have always felt to me a lot like acting; buyers and sellers feel our words aren’t real.”
8. Silence does the selling. Let silence do the heavy lifting. Ask the question, then stop talking. “It’s like a card game. The person who talks first loses.”
9. Change your words, change the conversation. Swap “feedback” (a word that warns bad news is coming) for “guidance”. Swap “database” (a shoebox) for “community”. Small word choices carry the whole relationship.
10. Collect questions the way others collect scripts. “I’ve got lots and lots of questions,” he told the Three Wise Men panel – and most of his sales meetings revolve around crafting new ones. His favourite for a hesitant seller: “What are you going to do if you don’t sell? Where are you going to go?” His most used question right now: “How did you come to believe this?”
On telling the truth
11. Tell sellers the truth – early. His hardest line from the 2023 panel, delivered at his own profession: “The sellers are up for what is the reality, but the agents often, no offence, aren’t up for the same challenge. We are scared. We don’t want to tell them the truth, and we wait way too long, Samantha, we wait way too long to tell them the truth.” He said to me just yesterday, “Any seller on the market at the moment is a realist.”
12. Let the activity make the price argument. Data talks. No inspections and no offers means the price is roughly 15 per cent above the market. Plenty of inspections but no offers, five to seven per cent above. Inspections and offers together – you’re on the money. Diagnosis, not opinion.
13. Nothing changes unless something changes. Open homes are like the cinema. If there’s nothing on, no-one turns up. If nobody comes to the first open, something is wrong – and waiting for open number two to confirm it is a week you’ll never get back. Reposition the price, the photos, or the words first.
14. The most powerful reset in real estate is an apology. When a listing is stuck, Chris opens with: “I’m sorry. I got the price wrong.” It cleans the slate, takes the blame off the seller, and lets everyone start again.
15. A report without a conversation is an X-ray without an explanation. Send the detailed weekly vendor report – then sit in the lounge room and interpret it, because “it’s still very easy to say no to someone on a telephone.” And on the day you list, write the seller’s motive in dark pen on the agency agreement, and return to it at every meeting: has anything changed?
On community
16. Give to give, not to get. The engine of the whole Hanley model. “There’s two ways to give. You either give to get, or you give to give. My view is that if you do the latter, if you give to give without making a lot of noise, the public’s pretty smart. They seem to work out what you’re about.”
17. Write to everyone, every week. Years ago he abolished A/B/C contact grading entirely. Instead, one communication goes to the entire community every Friday morning – something in it for landlords, buyers, sellers, and people who just like the photography. When he described it in 2017, it went to about 14,500 people. By 2023, 35,000. By 2026, 45,000.
18. Every sale has three parties. Borrowing an old Japanese merchant philosophy – sanpō yoshi, good for the buyer, good for the seller, good for society – Chris argues every transaction has a third party the industry forgets: the community it happens in.
19. Make people smarter, not impressed. On agents filling their newsletters with photos of themselves in front of sold signs: “Stop doing it. The public hate it.” Send information that makes people smarter, and “you build trust. You build a community. You build a real database, and you build that wonderful word connection.”
20. Do the community maths. For any young agent who thinks community building is too slow: add two people a day and you’ll speak to roughly 450 a year – 4,500 in a decade. If 5 per cent of these come to market 220 properties will be listed per annum. Long-term thinking made arithmetic.
On people
21. Culture’s caught, not taught. People read your culture within 5 minutes of walking through the door – the furniture, the smiles, the speed people move between desks.
22. Make recruiting part of your religion. “The single most important thing to do about culture is to make recruiting a part of your religion.” His interview questions are famous: Did you have a job at school? (Yes almost always gets the job.) What did your mum teach you? What am I not going to like about you in three months? And one he pinched from Napoleon – are you lucky?
23. Hire good, teach the rest. “You can find good people and teach them to do anything, but you can’t find people and teach them to be good.”
24. Go looking for the sore losers. A recruiting filter he borrowed from Sir Alex Ferguson, whose Harvard-documented line about seeking out sore losers seemed strange – until Chris realised every top salesperson he’s ever employed hates losing more than they love winning.
25. Build a business that works for women. “You cannot be a great leader, in my view, unless you can build a business that works for women.” When he said it in 2018, three of the top five salespeople in his market were women – all in his office, all million-dollar earners.
On lasting
26. Good businesses take share in markets like this one. “You’re a good business. You take market share when the market’s like this. You don’t lose it.” Through the GFC, sales in the Byron postcode fell from 472 in a year to 225 – and stayed down for five years. His office’s sales rose every single year of it.
27. You can’t cut costs to a profit. In hard markets, he separates muscle cost from fat cost, and cuts fat early – “you don’t wait.” But cutting is survival, not strategy: “You can only sell to a profit.” His budgeting rule is just as contrarian – look backwards, not forwards. Take last year’s actual numbers, reduce them by 20 per cent, and size your costs to that.
28. Focus on net, not gross. “Always focus on net, not gross.” He’s never borrowed money or run an overdraft, and recognises only two good debts in this industry – a building and a rent roll. The bad kind, in his words, buys the Maserati in the car park while you’re telling staff times are tough.
29. Keep a to-learn list. “They all tell you to have to-do lists. Well, yes, that’s great, but I got a better list. And pretty well every day of my working life for 30 years, I’ve got a to-learn list or a to-know list.” The logic is pure Hanley: “You can’t change your thinking without new information.” It’s also why the first hour of his day is tea and reading – business, science, psychology, surfing – before anything else. There’s no growth in the comfort zone.
30. Never had a bad year – because resilience is a practice. He recruits for sisu, the Finnish word for grit. He preaches the Novak Djokovic ‘delete’ – the top one per cent aren’t more skilled, they just erase the lost point instantly and play the next one. And he’s earned the right to the line that started this piece, because in his world mistakes aren’t the opposite of wisdom, they’re the path: “The path to wisdom is across the broken glass of making mistakes and train wrecks.”
There’s plenty more where these came from – including the story of an 11-year-old paperboy, a man named Mr Wooley, and the only sales close Chris ever learned. But I’m saving those ones for another day.
Because here’s the breaking news: Chris and I are teaming up for a special series of podcasts starting next week.
Think of it not necessarily as the usual podcast, but as a mixtape of conversations with some of the truly good people in the industry – conversations for principals and leaders working through the inevitable ups and downs of real estate.
We hope you enjoy it.