Episode #3
Bill Malouf: From Publican to Property Royalty, 38 Years in Double Bay
Bill Malouf didn't grow up in real estate. He ran his family's hotel in Auburn, and got into the industry at 35 after seven agents wasted his time trying to buy a family home, while one, George Devine, showed him two houses and sold him one of them. With no listings, no history and no credibility, he bought a painter's scrapbook and spent the next two years turning up to every auction in the eastern suburbs, recording his own opinion of value before the hammer fell. Ground floor or top floor. Lift or no lift. Views or no views. That book is what he still tells new agents to start today. In this episode Bill takes Luke through the Coogee Bay Hotel sale that put him on the map, why he stopped taking $30m-plus properties to auction after a conversation with John Singleton, the sealed-contract method he runs instead, and why he'll write his price on his hand before he'll ask a vendor for theirs. There's also a $43m deal that leaked from a 6am gym session, a 1:30am phone call from a stranger testing whether he really never turns his phone off, and a one-bedroom unit he refused to hand to anyone else. No graphs. No market-share slides. No fluff.
