Sydney’s real estate whizz-kid: Gavin Rubinstein
Real estate hotshot Gavin Rubinstein has mastered his lucrative Sydney territory and says the business is all about exposure.
Gavin Rubinstein is not your average real estate agent. The 32-year-old has taken out the top NSW agent award in the Ray White group seven times and has sold houses with pricetags up to $22 million. The nation’s most expensive real estate – Sydney’s inner-east harbourside suburbs – is his hunting ground, and he has mastered it with 5am starts, cold calls and the help of a new tool: Instagram.
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“This business is all about exposure,” he tells The List, sitting on the patio of a harbourside mansion in Point Piper with a perfect gun-barrel view of the city and the Harbour Bridge. He is accompanied by his personal videographer and photographer, who capture every key moment of his life for Instagram. “I think the more eyeballs or people who know about a property being sold the better; it just makes practical sense, right? And the number of multimillion-dollar homes I have sold off Instagram is insane. It is a phenomenal way to do business today.”
Rubinstein, who has more than 24,000 followers, says he has always worked with social media during his decade-long career – before Instagram, it was Facebook – and says it’s the perfect platform to deliver news of sales and future listings to the “right sort of” following. “Fifteen to 20 years ago, if you sold a property for a really good price you’d have to go through the Rolodex and call up all the neighbours,” he says. “Hi, Mr or Mrs Smith, I just wanted to let you know we sold 5 X Street for X amount of dollars. That’s how you get business, by people seeing you sold a property for a good price and then wanting to engage your services. So back then, you would have to make thousands of calls. Whereas today, if you have built up a really good following of the right sort of people, you can let 10,000 people know about your sale through the click of one button called upload. If used properly it is extremely powerful.”
The Bondi-born Rubinstein says he also puts a big proportion of listings on the platform, including regular “sneak peeks” of his high-end properties. “So I regularly get contacted before a campaign actually starts and often we are doing a deal before the campaign kicks off,” he says. He posts photographs plus videos of the homes – often with himself as host – as well as pictures and footage of him and his team. He is always impeccably presented, and this too is documented for social media. He takes selling to the next level.
It is a long way from where he started. Rubinstein’s first job, at 13, was at his local McDonald’s. His dad was a pharmacist, his mother worked in the beauty industry and he grew up in Bondi, sharing a room with his brother. “I saw my father work extremely hard, late, late nights and back to back. So that comes naturally to me,” he says of his decision to go into the workforce at a young age. “And I have always liked being independent. My parents were never in a position to financially assist or support, so I thought, I have to go get it for myself. And it has been the same pretty much ever since.”
He struggled at school – “I didn’t enjoy it” – but finished and headed to Europe with his mates for a gap year. On arriving in London, he met up with a friend of a friend, Nick House, who owned several high-profile nightclubs. “He offered me a full-time job,” recalls the agent. “I ended up staying for two years.” Rubinstein worked in the promotions department, and dealt with demanding clients who were paying thousands of pounds to secure a table at the nightclubs. It made him realise the value of good customer service but also of marketing, the power of media and generating buzz.
The now 32-year-old had always been encouraged to try real estate while he was at school (friends thought it suited his personality) and on his return to Australia he decided to give it a go. He was hired by Ray White in Double Bay as a personal assistant to two agents. After a couple of years learning everything he could, he graduated to agent. “It was then I started to discover I could get momentum, I could feel the momentum, I could see the future,” he recalls. “So I thought, let’s give it a crack, and then three years later, I got the award for the number-one agent in NSW [for Ray White]. Just last week, I got that award for the seventh year in a row.”
He credits an extremely strong work ethic for his success, as well as a serious number of phone calls. He still remembers his first sale – a townhouse in Vaucluse that sold for $615,000 – which came about through conversations he had as a personal assistant. “The main function of my role was to generate leads,” he recalls. “I was almost like a glorified telemarketer. I would just get on the phone and dial for dollars. I would completely cold call absolutely everyone and anyone in my core trade area, which is the harbourside eastern suburbs. I would nurture these leads to the point of them becoming sales down the track. You would get crazy amounts of rejection but rejection didn’t seem to faze me, because the goal I was working towards was always very clear.”
Those conversations paid off for one of his most outstanding sales – a triple, in fact, that included houses worth $9 million, $9.5 million and $8.5 million. It started with a cold call Rubinstein made while still a personal assistant, to a woman in the $9 million house. He developed a relationship with her so that when she wanted to sell, she came to Rubinstein. “And then, from that sale, I ended up selling the neighbour’s house about three doors down for $9.55 million. I then sold the buyer’s house for $8.55 million,” he says. “That was probably one of my most memorable sales.”
After 10 years at Ray White in Double Bay, Rubinstein has left to set up his own practice. Titled Ray White The Rubinstein Group, his firm has taken a number of the “phenomenal” team members from Double Bay with him as well as adding a few new agents. “I am super excited about this chapter and the challenges that lie ahead,” he says. “I pride myself on being able to demonstrate to the client why I am the person for the job because of the value I can add. And I’ve made a bit of a habit in the past decade of standing out by doing things just a little differently from my competitors.”