Gemma White had two career choices in mind when she finished high school: flight hostess or real estate agent.
After realising the main appeal of the former was simply a love of travel, she decided upon the latter.
“My interest initially stemmed from Mum and Dad,” she says, explaining how they have done a lot of property renovation.
“As a little kid, I would spend a lot of my weekends at properties they were renovating.
“I mostly remember going and feeding the ducks and buying lollies at the corner shop – but I was there a lot of the time, watching what they were doing.”
Gemma obtained her real estate licence with the goal of building her own property portfolio, and one day owning her own agency.
She initially worked at a sales-only office, then fell into property management, where she remains.
Throughout her career, she has taken periods off to travel, but always returns to property management.
“I’m at the point now where I am re-evaluating my career, and, as of next year (2021), I want to go down the line of sales,” she declares.
“It’s just been a very rewarding career, and there’s just so many avenues it can go down as well.”
During the early months of last year, Gemma took three months off work and disappeared, telling nobody at the office where she was going.
Of course, they know now that she was headed into The Bachelor mansion.
“I had spoken to my boss, and I couldn’t tell anyone where I was going, because we signed so many heavy contracts,” she says.
Gemma’s plan was to take the full three months off, and if she “didn’t walk away with my fairytale”, she would travel for the remainder of the time.
“We weren’t allowed to post on social media, we weren’t allowed to tell anyone where we were,” she says.
Then COVID-19 hit.
“As soon as I came out, I’d had numerous missed calls from the girls at work, and our boss, and even Mum and Dad had received calls: ‘When is Gemma coming back, we know that COVID has hit, and wherever she is, we know she’ll be coming home and we want her back’,” Gemma explains.
“So, as soon as I was back from The Bachelor mansion, I went straight into working from home.”
Although most of her contact with clients post-The Bachelor has been remote, Gemma feels that giving out her mobile number for work has added an extra level of perceived intimacy, on top of the recognition from The Bachelor.
“People feel like they now know me a little bit better, having that direct communication rather than calling an office number, so I’ll get text messages from clients, ‘We watched The Bachelor last night and, oh my gosh, you’re on it’.”
Thankfully, Gemma hasn’t seen any negative impacts from appearing on the show.
“When you go onto something like that, you question whether people are going to take you not-so-professionally in your job,” she reasons.
“I’ve worked so hard in my career, I’ve been in it for 10 years.
“You work so hard towards something that you don’t want an edit or something so minor to impact your career.
“I think, because I have been in my portfolio for long enough, and because I know a lot of my clients, everyone’s just been really supportive.
“I haven’t had it affect me at this point in time, in terms of my career.
“Hopefully, it stays that way.”
Look out for other agents in our agents x reality TV series and find out what they got out of it and how the experience changed them for better or worse.
