Our Story
From our Founder and CEO – Brendan Leahy
When I sat down to write this, I had a choice. I could tell you about what makes Naked Real Estate different, explain our approach, introduce our team, or walk you through our values. But I decided none of that would matter to you as much as understanding why I do this — because the story of this business starts with the story of me.
I grew up on a 5,500-acre cattle farm in the middle of NSW farming country. The second youngest of fifteen children. My parents weren’t big on lectures, but they drilled four rules into us that I still live by today:
- Put 100% into whatever you do — or don’t do it at all.
- Be kind to everyone, especially those less fortunate.
- Always leave a dollar for the next person.
- Don’t tell BS. Life is too short, and you need too good a memory.
Twenty years of business before real estate
I left school at 14 and started pushing shopping trolleys at the local supermarket. Eighteen months later I was the junior manager. From there came warehouse work by day and pubs by night to save extra money, my first business at 18, then a delivery business in Sydney moving brick pallets and later alcohol to pubs and clubs across the city, an upholstery and carpet cleaning business that grew to eight vehicles on the road, and finally an extended-warranty company supplying Harvey Norman, Myer, David Jones and around 65% of independent retailers nationally.
I could see consumer protection laws were about to change in ways that would reshape the industry. Eli Lilly — the US pharmaceutical giant — had been trying to build a competing operation for two years. When they came to me, after some tough negotiations they came back with an offer too good to refuse. I sold in 2001.
By then I’d learned what I needed to know — plenty of successes, plenty of failures, never stopped learning. I was ready for the next thing.
Moving west
In 2002, my wife Janine and I sold up, packed up our three children, and moved to Western Australia. That same year, I embarked on my real estate career.
I fell in love with it — but not the way you’d expect. It wasn’t selling houses that got me. It was the people. The sellers ready for the next chapter. The buyers about to build a family home. Watching people reach milestones that took them years of work to achieve.
But there was a big “but.”
The more I worked, the more I thought: the way real estate is done is broken. It doesn’t serve sellers properly. It doesn’t serve buyers properly. And honestly, it doesn’t serve agents properly either.
So I went looking for a better way. I spent endless hours and countless dollars training — AREC every year, principals conferences, trips to the US to learn from Keller Williams. I studied under the best in Australia: John McGrath, Shane Smollen, Mat Steinwede, Lee Woodward, Rik Rushton, David Knox, Dr Fred Gross, Matt Church and Michael Sheargold.
Starting my own agency
In May 2006, I opened Brendan Leahy Real Estate. I finally had the freedom to do things my way. Honest pricing. No conditioning. No BS. It took time, but the results came — and so did the loyal clients.
The lunch that changed everything
In 2010, I was invited to be one of the panellists interviewing Sir Richard Branson on stage at an event in Perth. The questions I asked — including drawing out his now-famous fishing net story about net versus gross profit — caught his attention. After the on-stage Q&A, his PA tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I’d join Sir Richard for the private board lunch.
At lunch, I introduced myself and went to hand him my business card. He looked at it and said:
“What’s that for? If you need a business card, your brand isn’t strong enough for people to remember.”
I told him: funny he should say that, because I’d been thinking about a name change. Naked Real Estate.
He smiled. “That’s it.”
I then pitched him the idea of taking the model further as Virgin Real Estate. His answer was simple: no one like me had ever put forward a proposal, so let’s see what you’ve got.
Within days, Virgin Management Asia Pacific’s Corporate Development team reached out asking for the full proposal. I went away and built it.
Naked Real Estate is born
Over the next two years I worked closely with two of the world’s greatest minds in marketing and business growth — Siimon Reynolds and Brian Sher — on the structure behind the brand.
Their advice was to split Brendan Leahy Real Estate (BLRE) into two separate companies: a new entity, Naked Real Estate, dedicated to sales — and the existing BLRE renamed We Love Rentals, dedicated to property management. Two companies, two brands, deliberately structured so each could grow on its own merits and, one day, be sold independently of the other. That structural foresight took time to put in place — there was a fair bit of government red tape to work through — but it set the foundation for everything that came after.
Virgin ultimately chose not to pursue new brand extensions in that period. But by then I had everything I needed.
On 27 August 2012, Naked Real Estate was born
The name wasn’t chosen to be clever. It was chosen because it stood for everything I wanted this agency to be: transparent, honest, no hype, no hidden agendas. Truth laid bare. And it was a name that — as Sir Richard Branson reminded me — wouldn’t need a business card to be remembered.
In 2024, We Love Rentals was sold as a standalone business — exactly as the structure had been designed more than a decade earlier. That sale lets us do what we do best: focus solely on our core business of selling homes. No distractions. Just selling your home.
Select Date Sale® — the final piece
In 2015, I introduced Select Date Sale® — the last piece of the puzzle I’d been searching for. It’s our registered, trademarked sale method, and it’s designed to do one thing: get our sellers the highest possible price the market will pay.
Today’s buyers are better informed than ever — comparable sales, suburb data, market trends are all at their fingertips. That’s a good thing. But the traditional sale process gives them one more advantage on top: visibility into the negotiation itself. They see the counters. They feel the seller bending. They know when pressure is working. Select Date Sale® puts some of that control back in the hands of the seller.
Why it beats an auction
At an auction, the winning bid is set by the second-highest bidder. The actual winner — the person who walks away with the property — almost always had more they were willing to pay. They just didn’t have to go there, because the room stopped pushing. That extra value never reaches the seller.
Select Date Sale® works differently. Every interested buyer submits their best offer in writing — price, deposit, finance period, settlement terms — through a signed DocuSign. We don’t reveal what other buyers have offered. We don’t run counter-offers. We don’t tell other buyers what’s been put forward. Each buyer has to commit to their actual ceiling, because they don’t know where anyone else is sitting.
The seller chooses the date by choosing the offer they’re happy with. If no offer meets the mark, the property stays on the market.
Across 79 settled sales in 2025, Select Date Sale® delivered an average premium of 14.01% above the listing price guide. That’s not theory. That’s proven.
Where we work.
Today, Naked Real Estate operates from our Kelmscott office, right in the heart of the Perth Hills. We specialise in Bedfordale, Kelmscott, Mount Nasura, Mount Richon, Roleystone and Seville Grove — the suburbs I know street by street because I live and work here.
Truth. Strategy. Sold.
That’s not a tagline. It’s how this business has operated for nearly 20 years. It’s what Sir Richard Branson backed at that lunch in 2010. It’s what I refined with Siimon Reynolds and Brian Sher over the next two years. It’s what my parents drilled into me on a cattle farm half a country away.
And it’s the promise I make to every seller who lists with Naked Real Estate.
If you’d like to talk about selling your home, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.
— Brendan Leahy
CEO, Naked Real Estate
08 6254 6333
brendan@nakedrealestate.com.au
Unit 1/198 Brookton Hwy, Kelmscott WA 6111