Warwick Searle

B.Bus | Accounting & Finance

Warwick Searle has spent twenty years selling rural property the length of New Zealand — family dairy farms, East Coast sheep and beef stations, kiwifruit orchards and multi-thousand-hectare forest estates. He is the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand’s Rural Salesperson of the Year for 2024, a two-time national Top Rural Salesperson within the LJ Hooker group, and the founder and director of Searle Agribusiness and its sister brand, Searle Forestry.

Warwick began his real estate career in 2006 with Harveys in Whakatāne, straight out of a Bachelor of Business in Accountancy and Property at Massey University. Four years selling large-scale dairy units and kiwifruit orchards across the Eastern Bay of Plenty gave him a working grounding in farm systems, production records and what actually drives a farm’s value on the day — and a dominant share of the region’s rural market. In 2010 he returned to his hometown of Gisborne as a director and shareholder of LJ Hooker Gisborne, where the office was named REINZ Top Rural Agency in 2012 and Warwick took the LJ Hooker group’s national Top Rural Salesperson award in 2012 and again in 2015.

On the East Coast, Warwick handled some of the region’s largest station sales, including Waikura, Pakira, Rewatu and Mohau Stations for Ingleby Farms — around 9,000 hectares carrying 37,000 stock units — along with Riverina and Avalon Station (2,255 ha, 20,000 SU), Taheke Station and Karaka Bay Station, and the sale of Greater Wellington Regional Council’s 5,430-hectare forest estate. In 2016 he moved to Auckland as a director of CBRE’s national agribusiness division, and from 2018 headed forestry for Colliers New Zealand, transacting individual holdings of over 20,000 hectares and more than $230 million of rural assets in the last two years alone.

That combination — hands-on dairy and station sales in the regions, then a decade running national and international campaigns for corporate and institutional vendors — is what sets Warwick apart. His recent farm sales include Ridgeview and Clear Ridge farms in Dargaville ($20.2m combined), Manawahe, Te Rahu and Otakiri Soldiers Road dairies in the Bay of Plenty, and a 4,000-hectare Northland portfolio of four forests and three farms sold in a single campaign. On the buy side, he has managed farmland acquisition programmes for Craigmore Sustainables (8,000 ha) and Juken New Zealand (9,000 ha).

Warwick brings a numbers-first approach to every appraisal — comparable REINZ sales, production and feed data, and a clear view of what a purchaser’s banker will need to see. His buyer database spans farming families, equity partnerships, corporate agribusiness groups and offshore investors, and he works regularly with overseas capital and the Overseas Investment Office process. He is a member of the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand and the New Zealand Institute of Forestry.

Clients describe him as “the consummate sales professional” — direct, discreet and focused on the best price the market will pay.