Everyone has a story: How Jonny Warren turned rock bottom into real estate success

Every property has a story. And behind every property is a person with a story. 

That’s the ethos by which Jonny Warren lives, works and has built his agency – Jonny Warren Properties – firmly upon. 

It’s a seemingly simple mantra, but to truly understand why it means so much to the Canberra real estate director, you have to also understand his story.

Warren is the first to admit his first foray with the real estate industry was anything but successful, noting he didn’t get the first job he went for at age 18.

Instead, he became a successful car salesman, before a trip to Perth to visit his cousin saw him move across the country semi-permanently.

But in Western Australia, Warren fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up hooked on drugs.

“I was addicted to ice for four years,” he reveals.

“I was jumping from home to home, I was homeless and I did wrong by people [as I was] trying to fuel my addiction.

“I lost my connection with my mum because I was always calling her saying, ‘I’ve got no money’ and she’d give me some.

“Finally, other family members got involved and said mum was not supporting me anymore. I look back now and think ‘oh f—, I was a dick’.”

Four years later, Warren’s mother sought him out in Western Australia to tell him she had cancer and he could choose the drugs or her.

“She said, ‘You’ve got two options. You can stay on the path you’re on, but you’re not going to have a mum, because I need to live the rest of my life happy, or you can come home and care for me’,” he says.

“The next day I was on a plane.”

What followed was a whirlwind of severe withdrawal symptoms, tough conversations with family members and Warren digging in to overcome his addiction, care for his mother, and repair his relationships with his siblings.

It wasn’t easy, but his mother’s illness provided him with the motivation to get his life back on track. In November 2014, he landed his first job in real estate, wearing a suit he had purchased at an op shop for an interview his uncle had helped set up.

“I remember going home to mum to say, ‘I’ve got a job. I’m going to be a real estate agent’,” Warren recalls. 

“She was just so happy, her eyes watered up and she said, ‘I always knew you’d be a real estate agent, but just remember, everyone has a story … treat everyone with respect and how you’d like your mum to be treated.’”

In the early days, Warren, like most new agents, was pounding the pavement, doorknocking, letterbox dropping and building his database from scratch. 

Six months into his career, his mum passed away, and while some feared he would relapse, Warren knew he had to keep moving forward.

With his mum’s words about every person having a story firmly in the back of his mind, Warren knew he eventually wanted to run his own agency based on that ethos.

Four years ago, he reached that goal with the creation of Jonny Warren Properties.

“We’ve grown from just me in my apartment to now having my wife as a part of the team, so we’re a small family business with 16 staff,” he says.

“And the business is growing. In the past 12 months, it has grown 61 per cent.”

Warren says that telling their clients’ stories is at the heart of everything he and his team do, with savvy marketing campaigns tapping into the emotional connection vendors have to their homes and conveying that to buyers through video, photos, marketing copy, and more.

“I’ve always believed that instead of generic ads, you tell the story of people,” he says.

“A really good example was Blaz and Zelka. We did an amazing video and created a beautiful ad about them and how he proposed to her (at nearby waterfalls) and then let everyone know in the corner of this house, looking out to the mountains. Buyers would come in and they’d be caught on an emotional level asking, ‘Is this where Blaz and Zelka told everyone they were engaged’?”

In the years ahead, Warren plans to expand the team, mentor the next generation of real estate agents, and open another office. 

Tapping into the power of artificial intelligence is also on the horizon in the short term.

“We’re building full automation for everything from listing presentations to follow-up systems to lead tracking, to updating all our notes in the CRM,” Warren says.

“We’re still beta testing … but it’s the way of the future, and it’s so my team can focus on dollar productive things and it gets them out of doing things that they don’t like doing.

“It means they can focus on the people-orientated side of real estate.”