“No, I didn’t have a choice,” Eoghan Murphy laughs, when asked if real estate was always on the cards.
“I left school halfway through Year 12 and moved over to England to play professional soccer over there, and I got released.
“I just wasn’t good enough.”
Returning to the Gold Coast, where he had lived since he was 10, the Irish-born Eoghan was at a bit of a crossroads.
“I was really struggling with self-identity and purpose and what I was going to do with my life,” he admits.
He took a job at a bar, and fate walked in, in the form of a new principal at the agency around the corner.
“We got chatty, and he offered me a job. That was that.”
After spending his life chasing a soccer career, Eoghan now had an outlet to focus his competitive nature.
However, he won’t be drawn on this trait being a transferable skill between sports and real estate.
“I think a lot of people like the fantasy of that, but realistically, it’s a completely different field,” he says.
“I’ve always been competitive and had a winning mentality, and I suppose that’s why this industry suits me, because I get to chase the win all the time.”
It would be easy to assume this winning mentality led to his appearance on Love Island, where he battled to win hearts.
Interestingly though, he saw it as a chance to take a breather.
“My whole life, I’ve not had the chance to sit back and have fun,” he says.
“I’ve just worked, whether it be in football or real estate.”
Despite Love Island being “a bit of fun”, he was scared that it would derail his fast growing career.
“I knew it wouldn’t have a positive impact,” he admits.
“At the time, I was doing a heap of deals. I’d just sold one for $5.5 million, $6.3 million and $5.3 million.
“I was living every agent’s dream, and I was walking away from it.
“I just thought to myself, ‘worst-case scenario, it will take me a year to get back up and running’, and sure enough, here I am.
“It seems almost poetic, because I just launched a $6.3 million listing last week, a year on from it.
“So, everything I said in my head has kind of come true.”
It wasn’t an easy road back, though.
“To be completely honest, I didn’t list or sell anything for the first six months of this year,” Eoghan recalls.
“It was a combination of coming back and having to start from scratch, after having five months off, and also COVID.
“A lot of people started to question whether I still had it, and a lot of people questioned my commitment.
“It’s hard to preach you are committed when you don’t have listings or sales on the board.”
Things turned around during the September quarter.
Eoghan listed 12 properties, sold five, and wrote roughly $250,000 in GCI since the start of July.
“But it took a while,” he hastens to add.
“I sat down in the office in the first week of February when I got back, and I had no pipeline, no listings, not even a slither of hope that I was going to snag something, and I cried for about a week – because I walked away from everything.
“I was on the top of the mountain in 2019, and I was back down the bottom.
“At that point I regretted it,” he says of Love Island.
“Not the experience, just the fact that I walked away.”
Eoghan explains that he didn’t do the show to create new opportunities, but because he wanted to live a life with varying experiences.
“I knew that I could be selling real estate until I’m 50 or 60 years old,” he reasons.
“But obviously, when you go and have your fun and then come back to reality and you’ve got to start earning a real dollar, it’s easy to think, ‘damn, I shouldn’t have done that.’
“But now I’m back to where I am. I’m glad I did it.”
Eoghan’s competitive streak remains intact too.
“I think anyone that’s in this wants to be on top of the game,” he says of his future goals.
“I don’t really think it’s an industry where you want to cruise.
“Everyone’s driven by wins and successes in this – and I hope that mine are the biggest and the best!”
