The Standards We Keep

For Catherine Goodwin, leadership is not about preserving a family legacy unchanged. It is about earning the right to carry it forward – knowing which standards should endure, having the courage to challenge those that should not, and creating enough space for the next generation to do things differently and build something of their own.

In 2005, Catherine Goodwin was 28, engaged, living in England and building a legal career. Then she came home to Auckland and became a property manager. “Most people, politely, said, have you lost your f**king mind? Who would leave law to become a real estate agent?”

But Catherine’s decision was as much about what she was being pulled towards as what she was leaving behind. London had allowed her to develop through law while exploring property, and she began to recognise how transferable those skills could be.

“I had this intrinsic pull to come back to New Zealand and stand beside Dad and help rebuild the business that my parents, Ashley and Raewyn Goodwin, had founded, and which at that time was traversing tumultuous change.”

Law never really left her. “Some days I wonder how people do the job I do without a law degree because of the complexity of what we deal with,” she says. “I’m just utilising those skills in a different way.”

Coming home to a family company did not mean being installed at the top. “I started at the coal face. I took a role as a property manager. I managed a large portfolio in Waitakere. I was very mindful that no one at Goodwins would ever be able to say I only had a role because I was Ashley’s daughter.”

Catherine’s family has been associated with Auckland real estate across four generations. Today Goodwins remains family owned, with Catherine, her brother Brendan, sister Sophia, husband Dave, and sister-in-law Aleina all involved.

The business itself has continued to evolve alongside the family. From its established residential property management and sales services, Goodwins has expanded into professionally managed, flexible accommodation through Goodwins Executive Stays and, more recently, established a presence on Waiheke Island. For Catherine, that growth is less about expansion for its own sake and more about responding thoughtfully to where and how clients increasingly need support.

The focus now is not simply to preserve what her parents built, but to keep those family standards relevant for the future: the professionalism, client relationships and service that became part of the company’s DNA.

“When I came into real estate and sat around leadership tables as a 28-year-old female, I was one of few females, and I was certainly the youngest.” But Catherine had grown up knowing women could earn that authority. Her mother, Raewyn Goodwin, was among the early New Zealand women to hold the AREINZ professional designation.

Property management led to operations, then general management. “It was often unscripted that people would simply say, when are you going to step up and do a bit more? And that to me felt right.”

By 2018 she was Chief Executive, and in 2021 she was named REINZ Manager of the Year across all real estate disciplines.

Those same years built the other half of the picture. She and Dave have three children, Oliver, Emily and Charlotte, and Catherine has never treated the two as competing achievements. “I feel extremely blessed by the family that Dave and I have created together, whilst also achieving the successes we have in business.”

There is a principle Catherine comes back to repeatedly: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”

For Catherine, standards are expressed in what a business rewards, what leaders notice, what teams challenge and what people tolerate. That extends to how women lead other women. Whilst careful to acknowledge that many of those women may have faced an even harder road themselves, “it felt to me like, okay, they had their success, so they ripped the ladder up”.

The lesson she drew from it was not simply about gender. It was about responsibility. If you have managed to reach a position where you can influence someone else’s experience, what do you do with that influence?

The Senior Leadership Team at Goodwins has tried to answer that question by building a culture around a deceptively simple principle: “We are good humans.”

“We’ve built our business around the fact that everyone has lives outside of these four walls. And if we can help them positively improve those lives, that’s our first ‘why’. We are enabling lifestyles.”
If someone has a child’s sporting or school event, or an important family or personal commitment, Catherine does not regard being physically present at a desk as the ultimate measure of contribution.

“We’re not clock watching anyone. We all know what we need to achieve.”

She is particularly passionate about a section of the workforce she believes businesses have historically underestimated. “The most underutilised part of our workforce is mums,” she says. “A parent can come in and get done between 9.30 and 2.30 what someone else might get done in a day.” Her point is not that expectations should be lower. It is almost the reverse. “You’re focused; you get it done.”

Flexibility, in Catherine’s version of leadership, sits beside accountability. Goodwins places significant value on people working alongside one another because collaboration matters. But she has little patience for confusing visibility with performance.

During the Covid lockdowns, Catherine was on a call with other business owners when someone asked how they could know whether staff at home were actually working. Another participant suggested monitoring employees through their computers.

“My blood started to boil,” Catherine recalls. These were people homeschooling children, caring for elderly relatives and still keeping businesses functioning. “Work is getting done. Just say thank you.”

For Catherine, one of the clearest measures of culture is what happens when the leader is not in the room. “If something goes wrong in a colleague’s life, our people are the first to wrap around them. When I see that happening without any prompting from leadership, I know the culture we are working so hard to build has taken on a life of its own.”

Retention is another measure. Several team members have remained with Goodwins for close to two decades, in an industry often described as “churn and burn”. Expertise, relationships and judgement take time.

Catherine has seen what happens when poor behaviour is allowed to exist inside otherwise professional organisations. It is why the distinction between stated values and lived values matters so much to her. It is one thing to have values written on a wall, another to live them. “If your values don’t align, walk away.”

“Values need to exist behind the gloss – they need to genuinely underpin how a professional business operates.”

The same philosophy shapes Catherine’s views on the industry. Goodwins has continued to operate professional trust accounts, undertake voluntary audits and invest in continuing professional development, even when lower-cost competitors sought to win business primarily on price. For Catherine, these were never optional extras; they were part of the Goodwins standard. She has spent much of her career advocating for stronger regulation of the property management industry.

“We have always stood behind the principle that value will trump cheap.” For her, pricing is not simply a commercial question. Eventually, it becomes a people question.

“The reality is you can’t run a good business on that model. You end up putting your staff under enormous pressure because, when the fees are too low, they’re simply having to do more. Ultimately, you can’t attract or retain the best people.”

Real leadership, in her view, is about being brave enough to ask the tough stuff: Are we actually doing what we say we believe in? Are our people genuinely thriving, not just working? Is the value we give our clients real, or just talk? And most importantly, are we leaving things better than we found them for the next person in line?

That last part is something Catherine’s thinking about more and more these days. The family business Catherine returned to more than two decades ago is changing again. Goodwins continues to evolve. UNIQ (uniq.nz) takes the family’s emphasis on trusted relationships, judgement and quality into the premium property market through high-end residential sales, buyer representation and curated stays.

It is the next generation’s interpretation of the business, extended to families and investors arriving from overseas.

More than 20 years after leaving London, Catherine is sitting in what used to be her father’s office. It is a meeting room now. The 28-year-old who came home determined that nobody would ever be able to say she was there simply because she was Ashley Goodwin’s daughter, is now leading the business her parents built. Yet perhaps the most important part of the legacy is not the business itself. It is the standard attached to it.

Asked whether she ever looks back at the legal career she might have had as the sliding door in her life, Catherine does not sound particularly interested in the life that did not happen.
“I’m more grateful for the doors that opened that brought me where I am today.”