Selling and helping – Otago’s Margot Berney

Just because you live in an area with a population smaller than an urban Kiwi high school doesn’t mean you can’t have a big vision.

With over a decade in the industry from her beloved Clutha district in South Otago, Margot Berney is not only one of Arizto’s leading salespeople in the lower South Island, but also one of the brand’s most dedicated mentors and advisors – being one of the original Business Support Manager’s (BSM).

As Arizto uses cutting edge digital technology through Apps and computer dashboards, Berney is able to assist salespeople around the country to hone their business processes and make sure their documentation effectively passes muster for the crucial component of getting homes under contract and sold.

These are practices she has plenty of experience with herself, having made dozens of sales for the brand in a smaller market since joining in 2021 – everything from high value family homes to quaint beach houses and plots of land.

She finds selling the attraction of her home region, thereby selling the properties under her purview, as a very simple task.

 “I live close to a small town, and it really is just a town of 500 people, then we got a lot of small coastal townships around us which aren’t too far away,” Berney proudly states.

 “[I love] everything – the location, the people, the community. Smaller communities, to put it bluntly, we get s**t done.

“I’ve sold a lot of property to North Island based people, Aucklanders, who have moved down here because it’s more affordable to live – average house price sales are probably about $380,000-390,000 at the moment.

“So they can sell their house up there and pay their mortgage, come and own a house mortgage free and enjoy a very different lifestyle to the North Island.

“Lots of little cribs and baches, we have a lot of little coastal towns like Pounawea, and Papatowai and Kaka Point.

“They’re all 50-50 permanent residence and holiday homes,  a lot of Airbnb properties and short term rentals as well.

“People from central who want to be close to the water, because they love it because we’ve got the Queenstown central lakes, but they want to escape the people - so they’re drawn to the coast because they want to be close to the water but they want peace and quiet.

“First home buyers, young families, affordable housing – good schools, good lifestyle.

 “There is also a bit of a pattern I’ve seen over the past 13 years of people that have left the area when they’re younger to go and chase other things.

“They will get married, have their families, and they will come back home, because they want their children to have the upbringing they had.

“There’s a big community pull, really.”

The journey of Berney’s buyers mirror her own, as she was Invercargill born and raised, getting into banking as a profession, before love’s labour saw her shift just north of the Southland border to take up the farming lifestyle.

 “I lived there my whole life until I met my soon-to-be husband, and then relocated up to here in Owaka in the Caitlins in 2008.

 “I’ve been part of most things in the community.

“I’ve been on the St Johns’ committee here, I’ve been part of Play Centre, I was on the Otago Plunket board at one stage, so quite involved in everything.

“I had four children, so they’ve all gone through the local school and onto secondary school.

“Farming’s an amazing life, and real estate was something that after I had my last child, I wanted to be able to have flexibility and be able to work from home and work around family.

“My brother actually is a real estate agent as well and had his own real estate company, and my grandfather also had his own real estate company.

“So I’d always kind of been interested in it and thought that was a great opportunity for me to get my papers and start doing it.”

Berney secured her salesperson’s license in late 2012, early 2013, and showed even then that she didn’t necessarily want to do things the “traditional” company way, ultimately creating an extension of her brother’s brand after unsatisfying conversations with other local agencies.

 “So I thought, ‘oh, well, I’ll just start a whole new company, and I did. It worked really well.”

However, that brand was brought out by one of the bigger companies at the start of 2021, so as Berney approached a time of uncertainty, it was serendipitous that Arizto’s current chief executive officer Daniel Budd was the first guy to call.

 “Dan had touched base about a year prior, and then a couple of other times, and then a week before this happened, he touched base again,” Berney explained.

“So timing is everything - I mean it literally is.

“He was in our mind anyway, and I very begrudgingly went along to meet him.

“I was in a bit of a head space where I was just not happy with everything [from the buyout], and didn’t really want to go down that track, but my colleague said to me, ‘pull your head in, and let’s go and just see what he’s got to say’.

“I walked out of that meeting and said ‘I want to sign now’, absolutely not a second thought.

“And then we launched, and our launch party was set for a date, and we went into [Covid] lockdown the day prior.

“But it didn’t stop anything, I launched with about seven properties and just kept going really.”

Little did salespeople around the country know at the time, but the ‘Covid’ market would be an absolute boom time for the industry – with Kiwis who now had no overseas travel plans and time to focus on their personal circumstances looking to secure new homes with favourable mortgage terms.

“I think that Arizto were in an incredible position during that period, where we could still list and sell houses because we could do it remotely, because of our technology,” said Berney.

“We were a step ahead of the game in Covid.”

Having achieved the higher qualification of an Agents licence in 2017, Berney’s experience also proved invaluable in the Arizto team management structure, as she initially held the position of a Regional Support Manager (RSM), which was restructured a year ago to the BSM position she holds now.

“I was able to do all of that remotely. I’ve been doing some form of management, really, for the last three years, but this is my biggest management role by far.”

And she is still able to lead by example, through her own portfolio of listings – given Arizto’s streamlined process is now famous for giving back time for salespeople to really focus on the core role of selling properties, rather than working through excessive paperwork and slower methods of client delivery.

“The technology – I do a lot of Google meetings, a lot of Zoom meetings,” Berney says.

“I can do both [roles] and do them both really well.

“Last year at the [Christmas] awards I got an award for 147 per cent business growth, from my own sales, while managing 50 plus agents.

“Because we’re still growing, a lot of the company is reactive growth, so we react to the size of our company and the requirements of the agents, the requirements of the vendors, the purchasers.

“This year and the next year will be quite telling for company size.

“I think if we keep growing the way we have been, we’re able to react very quickly now.

“We’ve just had the experience of the last year, which we expected growth but not as quick and fast as we received it, and that’s all incredibly positive for us.

 “We see new agents on every month, every day, and I doubt that’s going to slow.”

While Berney agrees no-one has a crystal ball, given the current real estate market has entered an interesting new phase where changes in the Official Cash Rate (OCR) has brought the buyers back out but at the same time seen record numbers of new listings in many areas – whatever shape the industry will be in through coming year, Arizto’s technology and modernised structure makes it the best placed company to handle sea changes.

“Thank you to Pernell [Callaghan] and James [Bailey], for creating this absolute beast, because that’s what it is.

“I really wanted to be part of this new company, this new journey. There’s a lot of trust when you’re given a job like a BSM. 

“For me, the most important thing about my role is my people, my agents.

“Just being given the opportunity by the company to do the job was massive for me.

“Arizto is it for me, I’m happy to stay here and really happy to see where this company takes me as well.”

Not bad for the South Otago farm girl.

Is it finally time to make the switch? Contact Arizto today to discuss joining New Zealand’s expanding and exciting team!