Canberra's Bree Prince on the importance of mentors and achieving 'more than I ever imagined'

At the age of seven, Bree Prince’s parents took her to an open home in Canberra, and from that moment on, her path was set.

“I remember being absolutely fascinated by it,” says Prince, now one of the ACT’s most successful real estate agents and auctioneers. “I worked out where I could put all my own furniture and studied how it all worked together.”

Prince was thrilled by the different architecture to her family’s nearby house, she loved the interior styling and, as for the floor plan, she pored over it for the next week.

“At school, I knew I wouldn’t be studious enough to become an architect or a designer, so I thought, ‘What could be a job where I could wander around and look at property?’ And the answer was real estate.”

From that day on, Prince, now an agent with HIVE Property in Deakin, barely flinched from her aim. She launched her career at 17, working weekends on the reception of a local real estate agency. From there, she went straight into real estate sales as her full-time job.

In 2005, Prince, back then under her maiden name Parker, had a high school sweetheart Jake Prince who joined the navy and was posted to Sydney. She followed him there and secured a job with McGrath Estate Agents on the Upper North Shore in Lindfield, Roseville and Killara.

“My parents’ house at the time was probably worth about $400,000,” she says. “But when I started working there, the average sales price was $3 million!

“It was a completely different world but I loved everything about it. It was a lot of work and a steep learning curve.”

One of the best lessons she learnt was at the hands of the kindly older woman who ran her first office. Prince had taken out all her piercings, including a nose ring, when she’d gone for the job interview. One day, she accidentally wore her nose ring into the office and was immediately taken aside.

“She said if I wanted to be in this industry and work in high-end real estate then I couldn’t do anything like that,” Prince laughs. “I was grateful to her for doing that. She definitely helped me understand how I needed to be and what I needed to do to become successful in prestige property.”

Prince, now married to that high school sweetheart, returned to Canberra 10 years ago and moved to HIVE, a boutique agency with a staff of eight, five years later.

Her enthusiasm for real estate continues. “The thing I love about this industry is that it’s always changing. No two days are the same and there are always new challenges, with something to learn.

“In some ways, I feel like I’m only just starting. There’s huge potential in Canberra for female agents and auctioneers and there are a lot of key female leaders in the sector right now. We’re seeing a changing of the guard in a way, away from being a male-dominated industry with a lot of masculine energy.”

Prince is certainly making plenty of waves of her own, selling 56 properties in the last 12 months.

Her highest recorded sale for the agency was a five-bedroom house at 10 Scarborough Street, Red Hill, which sold for $4.5 million by private treaty on September 05 last year.

Despite her success, Prince still has plenty of ambition left. In her private life, she’d like to try for a baby, whereas in her professional life, she wants to mentor others – just as she has benefited from mentors herself.

“I have a great circle of people around me who’ve taught me that I shouldn’t cap my own progress, and that I can achieve more than I ever imagined,” she says. “As a result, I would love to be the number one female agent in Canberra, as well as the number one agent in Canberra.

“I’d love to do some more mentoring and help younger people fast track their careers, too.

“And one day, who knows, I might go back and knock on the door of that house in Canberra where all this started. I still remember clearly where it is and I might very well visit.”