Denise Casey auctioned her first property at the tender age of 20.
Told by her estate agent father on the day of the auction that she was doing it – ‘‘I visited the toilet many times that morning’’ – the auction sale of a derelict cottage on an acre of land was noted in the local paper as being the first to be completed by a woman in Ireland.
While Ms Casey reckoned that was probably not true, she acknowledged it was quite unusual at the time when real estate was a very male dominated industry.
That same year, Ms Casey – now a director of New Zealand Property Solutions in Dunedin – bought her first property.
Laughing that she was on her way to the pub at the time, she recalled her father, Brendan, dragging her in to see his bank manager friend and telling him to give her a loan, in an attempt to settle her down.
Fortuitously, it coincided with the early years of the Celtic Tiger, the remarkable economic growth period experienced by Ireland from about 1994 to 2008 when the country transitioned from being one of the poorest in Western Europe to one of the wealthiest.
She sold the property three years later and doubled her money, the deal showing her at an early age what investment in property could do in terms of setting people up for life. It was not about being a tycoon, but a form of protection, particularly for women, she said.
Ms Casey grew up in County Longford, in the province of Leinster – ‘‘I like to say it’s Ireland’s best kept secret’’ – with her parents and six siblings, on a small farm where her father ran cattle.
Embarking on tertiary studies and enrolling in an estate agency degree, she quickly discovered that university was not for her.
‘‘I was a very naughty teenager and I forgot to go a lot of the time,’’ she said.
But she was a worker and she decided to work for her father instead.
‘‘He had a degree in life as he used to say,’’ she said.
Working for him was nothing new as she and her siblings had done that when they were children, attending clearance auctions and doing the lot numbers for him.
‘‘He’d be selling a farm, the furniture in the house, the farm machinery … you name it, if you stood still long enough, you’d be sold.’’
She actually sold her first house when she was 17 while working for her father over the summer months. In Ireland, driver licences could be obtained at 17 and her father told her if she could drive a car then she could sell a house.
She loved the experience, describing it as a buzz, and she had inherited her father’s love of dealing with people, a necessary skill given that real estate was a people business.
Her father, who died many years ago, also instilled hard work in her, but he also loved the craic.
‘‘He was a character. I have such fun memories [of his office]. It was mayhem, it was chaos. He was estate agent, psychologist and adviser to everybody,’’ she said.
That advice extended to one local woman who turned up one day to seek help from him about an itch that she had. After establishing that it was on her leg, he suggested dipping it in the water in a bog hole on her property.
‘‘He would treat everybody with respect, I learned this from him as well. The ultimate professional but he had fun and to get the fun out of a deal with people,’’ she said.
While Ms Casey might now live nearly 19,000km away from County Longford, she still has her father’s auctioneering gavel which her mother gave her.
In her early 20s, she wanted to see the world and she left Ireland in 2000 and headed to Australia. She felt she was too young to succeed her father in his business and she ‘‘didn’t want to screw it up’’.
She worked for a real estate agency in Melbourne which she recalled as ‘‘bloody hard, cut-throat and so competitive’’.
‘‘Literally its sink or swim there.’’
But she was unfazed by working seven-day weeks and the sale of that first property in Ireland enabled her to buy a home in the city.
In 2007, she came to Dunedin, having always had an affiliation to New Zealand with family living in Hastings. She learned the haka from her cousin when she was about 5 and her entire school was then taught, performing it for the parents.
She spotted a job advertisement online for New Zealand Property Solutions – ‘‘I remember thinking, ‘where’s Dunedin?’ – and several interviews ensued with her now business partner Lyndon Fairbairn.
Utilising her Australian contacts and knowledge, It was decided to set up a sister company called Australian Property Solutions which mirrored what the NZPS business was then doing, mostly listing and selling apartment blocks off plans for developers.
Ms Casey’s first impression of Dunedin was that it was beautiful but all she could also see was a multitude of Stop the Stadium signs, protesting the build of the Forsyth Barr Stadium, and she was coming from Melbourne, a city that was growing and building, she said.
She had been impressed with the subsequent development of Dunedin’s warehouse precinct, saying it was ‘‘unreal’’ how much it had transformed over the past decade, and she believed the stadium had been a catalyst for investment in the city.
NZPS was started by Mr Fairbairn in 2004 and it had done ‘‘lots of pivoting’’ over the years. It was a full-service firm and now had a team of 14, working out of recently refurbished premises in Princes St which was once home to the Shacklock oven factory.
A property management rental division had grown to more than 200 properties in three years and the firm had identified a gap in the market catering for higher end rentals.
Having ‘‘just good people’’ involved was key for Ms Casey who said the NZPS team was a ‘‘brilliant bunch’’ and customer service was paramount. Egos were left at the door, there was no hierarchy and agents sold each other’s listings.
The mother of three primary-school aged children said she had a lot to thank her parents for and she would never do anything else in her career than property.
While she returned to Ireland to visit family regularly, she considered Dunedin home.
‘‘Honestly, there isn’t a day that goes by that, when you’re driving around, you don’t go ‘wow’. Ireland is beautiful but Dunedin is next level. We are in one of the most beautiful places in the world, we are so spoiled.’’
sally.rae@odt.co.nz
