The secrets of the master realtor to the rich
Real estate identity Gerald Delaney has worked for the same firm for more than 40 years selling property for some of the biggest names in the country. Here are his tricks of the trade.
The restaurant known as France-Soir, with its red walls, white tablecloths, mirrors scrawled with specials and waiters cajoling in French accents, is a Melbourne institution.
The four decades-old Parisian bistro on Toorak Road in South Yarra, open from noon to midnight every day, is a favourite of Gerald Delaney – better known in the city’s property industry as the chosen real estate agent of the rich.
Given the circles in which he moves, it is little surprise that one of Delaney’s regular meal companions at France-Soir is the famed property developer, horse trainer and all-round Melbourne business icon Lloyd Williams.
Delaney and Williams have been best friends for decades, stretching back to the moment at 3am one evening in 1978, in another famous South Yarra restaurant, when Williams gave his good mate the opportunity of a lifetime.
“He told me, ‘Look, you would make a good real estate agent. There’s not too many in Toorak anymore. They are getting old, past their days’,” Delaney tells me over lunch at, appropriately, France-Soir.
“He then said ‘I used to own a business called Kay & Burton and I think there would be an opportunity of buying into that. You should be doing it so I’ll orchestrate it for you’.”
The rest is history.
Delaney, who has been in the real estate business since the age of 19, hasn’t worked a single day in another business since Williams did the deal to bring him to Kay & Burton in 1979.
Although, he now tells the world for the first time that he was sorely tempted six years ago, after he had steadily sold down his equity in Kay & Burton over the previous decades to cease being a shareholder.
“I did sign up to go to another major real estate agency, Marshall White, to be their chairman. But I pulled out at the last hour,” he says.
“I had actually signed a contract but to their great credit, Marshall White let me out of it and I went back to Kay & Burton as chairman.”
Over the decades, with his business partner Mike Gibson – who he recruited from the Kay & Burton rental office – Delaney has grown the company from its property management and home unit sales foundation to be a major prestige residential real estate company in the wealthiest suburbs of Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula.
His clients have included rich-listers such as Max Beck, Brian Blythe, Ron Walker, Sir Rod Carnegie and, of course, Williams.
“Real estate agents are egomaniacs and I don’t like to class myself as one, that’s not my style,” he says.
“But we did build ourselves up into a pretty high position in the marketplace from years of pretty hard work. I was very fortunate to have built up a lot of connections in the right areas.”
Delaney’s friends and clients say one of his most important attributes has been his willingness to hold great confidences. He proudly agrees.
“Agents can be terrible talkers or leakers or whatever you want to call them, but I have built up a good reputation for being trustworthy,” he says.
“I’m a great believer in integrity. I instil it into everyone who works for us, all the time. Honesty and integrity are the only two values you must hold and that has been good for me in terms of people trusting me.”
In his younger days Delaney, who is now in his 70s, had a unique ability to build relationships with business people often much older, who held significant positions of power and influence in Melbourne and the nation.
In addition to those listed above, they included the late ASX founding father Laurie Cox and the late legendary music promoter, Garry Van Egmond.
Delaney still socialises with others from that era who are still going strong. They meet every Wednesday afternoon at 5.30pm at the Botanical Hotel in South Yarra. They drink and chat together for at least an hour – sometimes far longer.
That group includes business leaders such as Just Jeans founder Craig Kimberley, former Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford, veteran stockbrokers John McIntosh and Andrew Bell, former Reece director Bruce Wilson, and Maxwell & Williams co-founder Max Grundman.
The group even recently bought a horse together.
“It has been going for over decade. We call ourselves local ratepayers, even though I live on the other side of St Kilda Rd,” Delaney says.
“A few have sadly left us in recent years, but it is something you turn up for. Some days there are only four there, some days there are 14. I have done a lot of business with all of them, but it is primarily a social thing. We are all friends.”
Headstart from the bank of Dad
Delaney was born at Swan Hill in northwest Victoria, the son of a lawyer who had moved there during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
With the law in his blood, Delaney junior moved to Melbourne for his senior studies where he attended the prestigious Xavier College.
But he failed English studies for his high school matriculation three times, dashing his dream of being a lawyer and setting him on a career path in real estate.
He can still remember buying his first property at 33 Dixon Street in Malvern in 1972 for $12,500. $1250 of the purchase price was borrowed from his father, who gave him six months to pay it back – and the rest from the Capital Permanent Building Society at an interest rate of 12 per cent.
He ploughed the profits from the $47,500 sale two years later into renovating and selling walk-up apartment blocks in Toorak and Armadale in the 1970s.
Delaney was only 22 when he got married for the first time. He describes his bride, Julie, as a “lovely, lovely person.” But they separated after just three years.
“I was probably a little neglectful because I was trying to get on in life and I was probably spending too much time out late at night with Lloyd Williams, whereas I should have been at home,” he laments.
“In fact, I can remember the end of my marriage. I was going on a holiday with my wife and I called it off at the last minute because I had a horse running at Caulfield and I wanted to go and see it. It was pretty silly on my part.”
Delaney also cared for his older brother, named Peter, for several years after the latter suffered brain damage and leg injuries in a horrific car accident when he was 27.
Peter lived for another quarter of a century but his quality of life was poor.
“I put him up in a flat in Melbourne for a number of years and he ended up in a nursing home before he died,” Delaney says.
“Obviously it was a tough time because he was a bit of a handful. My father asked me to look after him. So I did take on the family responsibilities. I have always taken an interest in people and helping people, and that applied equally to him.”
He has another older brother named Edward and a younger sister named Susie.
At Kay & Burton, Delaney became involved with property and media entrepreneur Antony Catalano, long nicknamed “The Cat”.
The former journalist and one-time Fairfax advertising director founded a firm called Metro Media Publishing in April 2010, targeting the lucrative real estate ad market in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
Its investors included Kay & Burton and rival agents Jellis Craig, Marshall White and Bennison Mackinnon. Delaney sat on the board for several years.
“Antony couldn’t achieve a union of agents, He couldn’t get them to agree because of their egos. But I was able to harness the key agents together, and I then ended up representing the four major agents to put a newspaper together for him,” Delaney says.
“It became an amazing and pretty big business. Then we sold out, ultimately back to The Age, for quite a significant amount of money at the time.
“Antony is a very creative minded fellow. He was very well versed in newspapers, he put everything on the line for that Metro Media product and he came up trumps.”
Another constant in Delaney’s life has been owning hospitality venues – he still owns the famed Lucky Chans Chinese restaurant at Crown Melbourne – and horses. In his formative years he even got suspended from school for running a book.
“I reckon the teachers, who were laying bets with me, just didn’t want to pay me,” he jokes.
There has not been a time over the past 50 years when he has not owned a horse somewhere, including with Lloyd Williams. He even owned a stud farm at one stage.
He currently owns 10 horses, but has given up betting on them.
“I’ve raced over 250 horses and while I’ve won plenty of races and had a runner in the Melbourne Cup, the elusive Group One has alluded me,” he laments.
Riding the ups and downs
Delaney baulks at nominating the best property deal he has ever done. Rather, he has fond memories of his most challenging.
“I remember selling a clifftop property in the mid 1990s for a lot of money down at Portsea to Max Beck. He didn’t want to buy it and he told me that clearly. But I just kept hounding him and I ended up getting him to buy it, selling it to him on extraordinarily good terms,” Delaney says.
“I see him quite frequently now and I remind him – as I told him at the time – that I always get his money back. That turned from being a $3m property to a $30m property.”
What gives Delaney the greatest satisfaction today is dealing with the children of his famous clients.
“They come to me because their fathers dealt with me,” he says.
He reckons he has never lost a friend through a deal, but admits going close once after crossing the now late legendary stockbroker Colin Bell.
“He gave me the greatest dressing down I’ve ever had in my life, because Colin was quite renowned for that,” he says.
“He was quite strong and abrupt. I shivered for about two weeks afterwards, I reckon. Anyway, we laughed about it for many years afterwards and remained great friends.”
Delaney has survived two cancer scares – the worst in 2015 when he had a melanoma removed from his lip.
The results of the biopsy came back late in the week.
Delaney was then ordered by his surgeon, Graeme Southwick – who had been introduced to him by former Western Bulldogs AFL club president David Smorgon – to abandon the auctions he had planned for the weekend to undergo immediate surgery.
“It made a bit of a mess of me at the time and took some recovery. They had to cut a lot of glands out of my neck,” Delaney says, before adding with a smile: “What they did do was kindly remove a double chin I had developed.”
Delaney has always been close to his only daughter, Chloe, from his marriage to second wife Joanne. Like his first marriage, the second lasted only three years. 40-year-old Chloe now has three children of her own.
He continues to pride himself on his work ethic.
For decades Delaney worked seven days a week – even giving up his membership of the prestigious Victoria Golf Club in preference for weekend auctioneering – and has long told any youngsters who aspire to follow him in the profession to do the same.
Asked what would be his advice to his younger self starting out again, his answer is immediate and with a killer punchline.
“I see too many people come into the industry and they think they can put on a blue suit, get an REIV diary, buy a blue BMW and that they are going to make themselves a lot of money,” he declares.
“The truth is you have got to be persistent, you’ve got to be prepared to work hard and not become overly ambitious to earn more money than you are entitled to earn. So don’t be greedy.”
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