Power Players: The Real Estate Institute of Australia's president on rising to the top

Leanne Pilkington was blooded into real estate long before she was old enough to have a mortgage.

Now president of the Real Estate Institute of Australia, she started answering phones at 12 in her father, Peter’s, real estate agency in Sydney’s Hills district. 

From the green receptionist to one of the country’s most high-profile property practitioners, Pilkington’s days now deftly switch from evaluating housing policy to fronting the press, nurturing new agency owners and working with agents in the field.  

As a youngster in her family business, she saw firsthand the joy and pressure of the transaction. Years on, it has steeled her to advocate for an industry that intersects with every Australian’s life.

“My mum was in the business as well – it was all that I knew,” Pilkington says.

“I thought about becoming a school teacher. Dad said to me, ‘Come and work for me for a few months while you’re waiting to go to uni.’

“Once you’ve been in real estate for a little bit of time, it gets in your blood. It becomes a way of life.

“I like dealing with lots of different people. I find I can communicate with people no matter what they do for a living or where they’re from.”

Pilkington is the guiding force behind the agency network Laing + Simmons, and is its chief executive and director.

Her first sale, made at the age of 18, for $64,000 during an inspection in the western Sydney suburb of Winston Hills, happened unexpectedly. 

“I will never forget it, because I was so surprised that they wanted to buy it,” Pilkington says. “I had to take their details down on the back of my own business card using an eyeliner pencil, because I did not even have a pen with me.”

The role of the agent has long since changed. The business card is only one casualty of the tech transformation. 

“Real estate agents are no longer the information gatekeepers,” Pilkington says.

“Once upon a time, everyone had to come to the agents to find out what was going on, what prices were, what properties were being sold for. Now, all of that information is out there for people to find themselves.”

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Pilkington is the go-to for scores of real estate pros. She stays atop her game with mastermind sessions with other business leaders, and the group is currently reading and discussing The Success Principles by Jack Canfield.

She is four years into a 10-year growth plan for Laing + Simmons, and high on her big-picture agenda is the crucial subject of national housing supply. 

It is where Pilkington wants to see a “serious” response from the federal government.

“There has been a lot of conversation and a lot of promises, but there hasn’t been delivery,” she says. 

“The biggest problem that we’ve got in the industry right now is lack of supply, and that’s fueling home prices. It’s fueling increased rental prices.

“If the government could deliver on that, we would all be better off.”