After arriving in Australia from Italy, Zoran’s grandfather began investing in property, with some of the homes he bought in the late 1960s still held by the family today.
As a child, Zoran remembers helping collect rent and look after those properties. It gave him an early lesson in property that has stayed with him.
“The biggest lesson I think is that investing is for the long term, not get-rich-quick,” Zoran says. “And if you make sacrifices early in life, they pay off down the track.”
Property became Zoran’s career almost as soon as he finished school. In 2008, he joined the family business, Hot Property Buyers Agency, which began as a mother-and-son operation.
At the time, buyer representation was still relatively new, and Zoran says the imbalance in the traditional real estate model was obvious.
“We wanted to balance the scales and give buyers a competitive advantage in a market that historically represented sellers,” he says.
Today, Hot Property Buyers Agency remains deliberately boutique. Zoran runs the Brisbane-based business with his wife, Maddyson “Maddy” Solano.
The pair were high school sweethearts, and Maddy had also grown up around grandparents who invested in property. After school, she worked in administration and property management before formally joining the business in 2012.
These days, they work together helping clients through the buying process, with a focus on owner-occupiers in Brisbane’s inner north and investors purchasing across Southeast Queensland. Zoran says many clients make contact because they are unsure where to begin.
Some do not know what their budget will realistically buy. Others have started searching before organising finance or the professional support they may need to transact.
For owner-occupiers, there is often another layer: working out what will suit them now as well as several years into the future.
“A lot of buyers just aren’t actually in a buy-ready position when they start searching,” Zoran says.
Part of his role is helping clients clarify those decisions before the search gathers momentum. The agency’s size also shapes the experience.
Zoran and Maddy keep clients updated regularly and use WhatsApp for more informal communication throughout the process.
“There are no silly questions,” Zoran says.
Around 35 per cent of the properties the agency buys each year are genuinely off-market, according to Zoran, including homes sourced through selling agents and directly from owners.
But access is only one part of the job. A recent purchase for an older couple brought the human side of buyer advocacy into focus.
The couple had been referred by the agent selling their existing home and had not bought property for more than 30 years.
“They were like first-home buyers again,” Zoran says.
The process had changed significantly since their last purchase. Transactions were more digital and more legally complex, while health issues were also making it difficult for them to attend inspections.
“They became prisoners in their own home,” he says.
The task became less about simply finding another property and more about helping the couple move into a home that suited their lifestyle now and would continue to support them as they grew older.
Zoran describes it as one of the most fulfilling purchases the business has handled in recent years. It also reflects how he prefers to measure success.
“We’re not looking to take over the world,” he says.
Rather than focusing on transaction numbers or total purchase value, Zoran says he wants the business to remain small and personal, working with clients who value the experience he and Maddy bring.
That long-term view also shapes his own approach to property. Zoran says his personal philosophy has generally been to buy, renovate or add value, and hold. When he has needed to sell, he has often regretted selling more than buying.
“Property is definitely not a get-rich-quick scheme,” he says. “If you don’t have to sell, try and hold onto that property for as long as you can, because ultimately, it’s time that is the biggest factor to success.”
Now, as president of the Real Estate Buyers Agents Association of Australia (REBAA), Zoran hopes to bring that same long-term thinking to his industry, helping strengthen professional standards and distinguish experienced buyer representation from poor practice.
For him, the lesson goes back to those properties his grandfather bought more than half a century ago. The value was never just in buying them. It was in holding them long enough to see what they could become.
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