Property passion:
Andrew Winter warms to selling houses.
We love snooping around other people’s houses, don’t we? “Oh we absolutely love to,” enthuses Selling Houses Australia host Andrew Winter.
The chance to pry inside the lives of other people is one of the reasons for the success of the long-running series in which Winter, interior designer Shayna Blaze (The Block Australia) and landscaper Charlie Albone help enhance the appeal of homes that are proving difficult to sell.
But Winter has some other ideas about what makes the series
such a hit.
“I think the appeal to the viewer is just me,” he jokes, before adding, “The beauty of the format is that it’s just about real people having trouble selling their houses, which a lot of people go through.”
The forthright opinions of the charismatic presenter, who is originally from the UK but has lived in Australia since 2005, have made him a popular figure on screen.
Winter says he takes “great pleasure” in pointing out the flaws in people’s homes.
“Every now and again I’ll read on social media, ‘He’s so rude’. I don’t care.
“What am I going to do? Say ‘Oh this house is
really lovely, I
haven’t got any idea why it hasn’t sold.’ That wouldn’t really work.”
The series, currently in its 15th season in Australia, has no shortage of people seeking help.
“We have a rule on the show that we don’t go and help people unless they’ve been genuinely trying to sell the house for a considerable amount of time,” he says.
But he admits that sometimes those desperate homeowners are reluctant to take the advice of the professionals.
“I think the real battle tends to be when you have somebody that’s lived in a home for a long time and collected a lot of things, all of which are very important to them. And they can’t imagine why somebody wouldn’t want to look at all these beautiful things.”
Winter, who has three children with his wife Caroline, previously hosted the original UK version of the show before moving to the Gold Coast, Queensland.
He has also co-hosted Love It Or List It Australia with Neale Whittaker and has written two property books.
He had a passion for property from a young age and bought and sold his first home at 18. Over his long career in real estate, Winter has observed what turns prospective buyers off the most.
He says some of the greatest crimes you can commit when trying to sell a house are leaving piles of laundry visible, your bed unmade and your toilet dirty. But what’s the worst thing he has ever seen?
“The worst thing ever, oh that’s very easy. That’s back in my English real estate days when I listed a beautiful old heritage-listed country manor house that was in fairly bad disrepair.
“The homeowner hadn’t paid
the rates for several decades, so all the services to the home had been cut off. She hadn’t paid bills so, therefore, she didn’t have a toilet.”
You don’t have to stretch your imagination too far to figure out where the story is going but it ends with Winter stumbling upon a big room that had plastic bags full of waste “several metres high”. “That was quite a shock.” While homes are sometimes haunted by their owner’s past, Winter says he has yet to encounter a home that is actually possessed by a former occupier. Although he says there was a property in one episode of Selling Houses Australia in which the owners were convinced there was a presence.
“Me, I felt nothing,” he says. “I’ve been in homes over the years that have felt creepy. I wouldn’t necessarily say they felt haunted to me but people talk about the feel of a house. That I believe. Homes bizarrely enough do have a feel.
“But for one person it will have an amazing feel and another person will say, ‘It’s lost on me’. So it’s really interesting.”
Starting a lavender farm is perhaps not the career trajectory you would expect from a former professional snowboarder.
But for Stef Zeestraten and his brother Tim, buying a herb farm presented an opportunity for them to enjoy their recreational pursuits while owning a business.
“It’s definitely a good conversation starter,” laughs Zeestraten. “Yeah, ‘I’m a lavender farmer’ in the setting of the snowboard scene is quite fun, or the other way around.”
Their lavender farm has become a bigger beast than they ever anticipated but the brothers wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I think me and my brother both wanted to see how we could have a lifestyle in Wanaka that supplemented the things we like to do but also was able to put bread on the table,” he says.
“So we had to make a viable business plan out of it and see if we were actually going to do it properly or if we were just going to do it as a hobby.
“It became pretty apparent pretty quick that we were going to have to commit to it properly to be able to make it some sort of success.”
Their journey with this versatile plant began when Zeestraten’s parents were looking for a new business. The family have always been involved in horticulture and his mother Corry had a particular interest in herbs. Zeestraten pointed them in the direction of a lavender farm for sale in Kaikoura.
“In that sort of process, me and my brother learnt about their lifestyle and how they ran and operated it and we just sort of thought we’d start on our own down here in Wanaka.”
The brothers bought a plot of land close to Wanaka township and put in the hard work of transforming it into a lavender farm.
“There were a few cows on it and a few old trees. And then other than
that it was a blank canvas, and we literally had to start from scratch.
“The start of it was definitely three years of pretty hard grinding to get the place up and running. To be able to open to the public was a huge milestone after three years of gardening development.”
Wanaka Lavender Farm has the fields of scented purple blooms you would expect from such an enterprise, but it also has farm animals, a shop which sells lavender products, and a tea room where people can enjoy lavender-infused treats, including a unique icecream.
“It is probably one of our most popular items outside of the ticket into the garden. I would say that most people can’t really imagine it and we definitely have to be careful not to overdo it. We’ve partnered with an amazing icecream maker in Wanaka, NZ Pure icecream, and so they’ve been able to help formulate it and get the taste exactly right.
“Lavender is absolutely amazing in food surprisingly, when used subtly and used right. It can have a horrible taste if you
“Lavender is absolutely amazing in food surprisingly, when used subtly and used right.”
– Stef Zeestraten
Actor Shane Cortese really is a man of many parts. A three-time winner of TV Guide’s Best On The Box best-actor award, he is one of New Zealand’s best-known faces – but now he has a new role.
When the acting jobs started to dry up four years ago, Cortese looked elsewhere for work and fell in love with real estate. His new show, Dream Home Dilemma, is an unexpected opportunity for him to combine his two work passions – television and real estate.
“I remember being on a golf course out at Huapai on a Monday with James Griffin, the writer of Almighty Johnsons, and he got the call to say, ‘Hey, it (the series) is not going ahead’,” Cortese says.
The Friday of the same week he was back at Huapai, this time with Nothing Trivial producer Chris Bailey, when he received word that show too had been cancelled.
“That week my whole following year was taken away. That’s an actor’s lot but you still need an income. I wasn’t being considered for a new shows, because perhaps I’d been on too many and my face was too well known, and I just kind of felt, ‘I don’t want to leave the country. I’ve two kids here. I want to stay here’.”
After 10 years in musical theatre in the UK, Tauranga-raised Cortese returned to New Zealand where
he became hugely popular playing Dominic Thompson, the sinister brother of Chris Warner (Michael Galvin) in Shortland Street. Roles in Outrageous Fortune, Burying Brian, The Almighty Johnsons and Nothing Trivial followed.
“I’ve been very lucky. I worked in a golden age of television when people actually sat down to watch a programme at a time when it came on,” Cortese says.
“Now you stream a programme on Lightbox or TVNZ OnDemand or Netflix or whatever.
“You don’t actually sit down at 7.30 on a Tuesday night to watch. That was a great time to be involved because it was kind of at the end of that appointment viewing.”
However, after 25 years as an actor, Cortese was no stranger to trying his hand at different jobs to make ends meet between roles and when he was offered a job in real estate he plunged right in.
“I did a load of things I didn’t enjoy. I’ve handed out things in railway stations in the UK. I’ve driven trucks around delivering Coca-Cola – things I haven’t enjoyed. This, though, is enjoyment,” he says of his new career.
“This is great. My life now is 24/7 auctioneering and real estate so it’s busier now than it’s ever been.
“There’s not a lot of time to act or anything like that. I get offered the odd role but the focus is really on my new phase of life now and that’s real estate.”
Cortese leapt at the chance to take part in local series Dream Home Dilemma which aims to help Kiwis – many of whom are first-home buyers – on to the property ladder. It uses his skills and those of real estate agent Anita Dobson and interior-design expert Hamish Dodds to find the right properties.
“This was an opportunity to take a step away from acting and actually stare down the barrel of the camera, which is very, very different to pretending the camera is not there. It was fun and I thoroughly enjoyed it,” he says.
The show took Cortese and his team around New Zealand. “We didn’t want to make it Auckland-centric because real estate in New Zealand is so diverse,” he says.
“I loved being in Cromwell where we worked with two rugby-loving young blokes who joined forces to buy their first house. We also went to Hamilton and we shot a mum and dad trying to buy an investment property that their kids would rent off them. That was tricky. We’ve dealt with all types of buyers.”
Cortese has high hopes there will be a second season and says he is still open to acting opportunities, confirming he will be back in his role as lawyer Dennis Buchanan in the upcoming seventh season of The Brokenwood Mysteries.
“I absolutely love what I am doing now. I would never say never and I have a great boss who, when I joined the team, said, ‘If the right role comes along for you, we’re going to make it work’,” he says.
“But the other side of it is, I love what I do now and if I’m standing in a room and watching someone about to make a million-dollar-plus purchase and the night before they’ve seen you with your pants down with some girl in a television programme pretending to be someone else, it’s kind of, ‘Where’s your head at, Shane? Is it helping me buy this house?’ I often think about that as well.”
“My life now is 24/7 auctioneering and real estate so it’s busier now than it’s ever been.”
– Shane Cortese