Cherie has been widely known as ‘Australia’s Renovation Queen’ since 2002. She’s personally renovated 175+ properties, transacted more than $75 million in property & has trained over 20,000 students who now replicate her proven process.
With a cult-like following spanning 40 countries worldwide, she’s one of the very few property experts who puts her knowledge & skills to the test regularly, in front of nationwide TV audiences. Cherie is recognised as Australia’s undisputed authority on renovating for profit.
Cherie is born into an average working-class family. Growing up in the western suburbs of Sydney, she’s the eldest of 4 children to a stay-at-home mum & earthmoving excavator dad. Life is basic in this household but one that Cherie wouldn’t change for the world, keeping her grounded throughout the rest of her life.
Aged 21 & working 2 jobs, Cherie buys her first, low budget home on a 6-lane highway. Realising her mistake, she looks to get out quickly & on-sells the property soon after. She cleans up the property, making a small modest, accidental profit in the process. This is her first taste at making money, outside the 9 to 5 grind. She buys another home, on a quieter street & spends the next 8 years renovating it, room by room, inch by inch. She renovates 2 homes in her twenties, as her principal places of residence.
Bitten by the renovation bug, Cherie dives headlong into a cosmetic renovation that she completes whilst holding down her full-time job. It’s her first ‘professional’ project which she approaches strategically & systematically. When she sells the property immediately on completion for a huge profit (breaking a new suburb record in the process), she realises there’s more satisfaction renovating old houses than her corporate day job.
Cherie quits her full-time job & becomes a professional renovator. In the first year of her new career, Cherie buys 6 houses with a combined value of $6.2 million. She achieves this with no stable income, no job & very little money behind her. She starts developing systems, processes, checklists & templates to streamline every renovation she does thereafter. She is way ahead of her time before renovating even became popular.
Cherie makes her TV debut on Channel 7’s Today Tonight program. She becomes a program regular as they continue to follow all of her projects & her subsequent successes. Newspaper articles soon follow with the media keeping a keen eye on her renovation projects. The media soon dubs her ‘Australia’s Renovation Queen’.
After constantly being asked by people how she renovates for a profit, Cherie establishes Renovating For Profit, a company designed to teach people the art & science of renovating. She registers the company & domain names of Renovating For Profit & personally develops & launches a ground-breaking course that teaches people how to buy & renovate property for a profit. She develops world firsts… step-by-step guides that document how to renovate, step-by-step, amongst a plethora of other systems. The course is an overnight success, quickly catapulting her company to a market leadership position in the property education space. At the same time, Cherie is signed to a national promoter on the Australian professional public speaking circuit, quickly becoming a highly popular & in-demand property speaker.
Cherie is invited to become an original cast member of The Living Room, a new lifestyle show on Channel 10. Week after week, she puts her rapid renovation skills to the test on national television, pulling off amazing budget transformations in record time. She remains on the show for the next 8 years, as an original cast member, leaving at the end of 2019 to pursue a new TV opportunity.
Cherie has now notched up a significant number of renovation projects of her own. Renovating For Profit has grown & expanded considerably, with her flagship course Cosmetic Renovations For Profit remaining Australia’s most popular renovation course. In less than 3 years, over 5,000 graduates have completed Cherie’s training.
In recognition of her growing achievements & extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit, Cherie is selected as a NSW finalist in 2 categories of the coveted Telstra Businesswomen’s Awards. It’s the first of many accolades that signal her personal & professional success.
Due to her significant renovation achievements, Cherie is offered her own renovating show on America’s HGTV network. She heads off to Minnesota for 4 months block filming to film 5 Day Flip, a reality renovating show that requires her to renovate a whole house, inside & out & back on the market, in just 5 days. She transforms 9 houses in just 11 weeks for Season 1, with just a small crew behind her. All properties sell for a profit. By her own admission, it’s a bold move & one that pushes new personal frontiers. Her courage pays off with the show syndicated in over 40 countries globally.
It’s time to embrace the new digital era & take RFP online. Cherie’s flagship course Cosmetic Renovations For Profit goes online, giving students the flexibility to learn at their own pace from the comfort of their own home.
10,000+ Graduates.
It’s been 7 years since Renovating For Profit first opened its doors with over 10,000 graduates having completed Cherie’s training. Cherie’s Facebook following grows to over 100,000+ fans & RFP becomes Australia’s largest community of renovators with over a quarter of a million people in her community. A whole following of passionate property investors are now finding their own road to renovation riches.
Cherie adds another notch in her toolbelt, becoming the author of her very first book, Renovating For Profit. It’s distributed throughout Australia, the USA & the United Kingdom.
Cherie reaches a significant career milestone having now personally renovated 100 properties. Her 100th project is followed on Channel Ten’s The Living Room. She gets hold of a property valued at $1,200,000 pre-reno, does a 10 day cosmetic renovation, spends $60,000 & gets the property resold immediately thereafter for $1,400,000. She continues to be the only national renovation expert who puts her skills to the test, in full display & to the critique of nationwide audiences.
RFP teams up with national property development expert, Bob Anderson to launch Small Developments For Profit, an online course that teaches everyday people how to do small property development deals. At the same time, Cherie Barber puts the tools down for 4 months, puts pen to paper & personally creates Airbnb For Profit, a highly detailed course teaching people how to turn a spare room or their investment properties into Airbnb rentals for additional cashflow.
Cherie launches Create Your Perfect Kitchen, a kitchen renovation course that teaches homeowners or property investors the step by step process of how a brand new kitchen is installed. It’s a great one for anyone who is disillusioned with the hefty price tag others have quoted to do their kitchen.
Cherie joins the cast as co-host of Channel 9’s new show, Space Invaders, a decluttering, trash n treasure & renovation show, all rolled into one. In this series, Cherie has just 2 days to renovate someone’s home on a tiny budget of $20,000 or less. She renovates 10 properties, back-to-back, for Season 1. At the same time, Cherie secures her largest reno project to date – a tired old resort in Byron Bay. It will be a 10-year project, master planned over various stages into an eco-friendly resort, mixed with a hint of mid-century design. She is also neighbours with Chris Hemsworth which is more important to know than the project itself 😊
RFP launches Home SuperSaver, a membership community enabling anyone to save a significant amount of money each year off their renovation, home furnishings & everyday products you’re likely to use in your normal day to day life. At the same time, Cherie completes a strategic deal with The Ambassador Card giving Home SuperSaver members phenomenal discounts off their groceries, petrol, alcohol & many of the big brand stores. Through this group, Renovating For Profit becomes one of Bunnings major national accounts.
Cherie secures another milestone project – her 150th, buying a tired Australian homestead in Mulgoa, NSW. She sets the wheels in motion to undertake a major structural renovation to the existing property, converting it into the ultimate modern farmhouse – a 5-bedroom, 5-bathroom luxury home on 5.5 acres. With planning underway, it will be 3 years in the making & the largest, single residential renovation of Cherie’s career. The renovation is due to start construction in April 2024. In June 2021, Cherie also completes Stage 1 of her Byron Bay resort renovation, renovating 4 existing cabins on the site in just 3 weeks.
Cherie continues to be co-host of Channel 9’s popular Space Invaders TV show. She renovates 10 properties over 14 weeks each year for 2021, 2022 & 2023, transforming a wide range of Aussie homes on a tight budget. She currently remains as co-host of the show.
Cherie puts the tools down for 12 months (juggling a couple of renos in between), putting pen to paper completely rewriting & refilming her flagship course “Cosmetic Renovations For Profit” to reflect the changes in the property world, following the global pandemic. This is a mammoth task that sees the course relaunched to world-class standards. She’s adamant no other renovation course comes close. Most of her now competitors, were her students.
Recognising that a lot of people don’t start their property journey the right way, Cherie launches her “Property Structure & Strategy” course, designed to teach new & existing property investors how to buy their properties in the right entities, before they buy. It’s designed to be a starting point for anyone interested in property.
