I was born in a small dairy and sheep-farming town in the north of New Zealand. So I am a "kiwi" (our national bird-before it was a furry fruit). When I was four years old, our family moved to the suburbs of Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, which is where I received my education--mainly at Catholic schools. When I was 15, my father, a trade school teacher, got a job in Sabah, East Malaysia, and we lived there for two years. After high school, I went to university for two years, majoring in English, and then to the New Zealand Drama School, studying acting and theater full-time for two years. On graduating from there, I traveled to California on my personal quest for truth and understanding through deeper experience, living in the San Francisco Bay area for two years, working in a health food store, selling house plants off the back of a truck and visiting Lake County numerous times.

I then returned to New Zealand and worked as a camera store manager before getting into real estate in 1981--working first in the inner city of Auckland, selling many Victorian homes in an area undergoing re-development from a poor working class area to a gentrified area catering to students, artists and 'yuppies', transforming over time into a fashionable sought-after area.  

After four years of selling real estate successfully, I became interested in the challenge of management. I was offered the chance of managing a struggling sales team in another part of Auckland. The company was ready to close the office down, because it was losing money, but I was willing to give it my best shot. My secret dream was to turn it into their most profitable sales team. Secret because it would have sounded presumptious to say this. But in five years I was able to do just that. I built and trained a team of mainly young people like myself into a powerhouse of residential real estate sales, putting together over 650 transactions in a year, and becoming the most successful residential team in the whole country.  

Having reached this goal, I took a four-year break from business, devoting my time to spiritual practice and service work in Fiji and then in Lake County, until my funds ran out. In 1994 I returned to real estate in Lake County joining Country Air Properties. In 2007, a number of us joined together to form Timothy Toye & Associates, a team of realtors based on the principles of right real estate practice that I have developed over my career. We are currently the largest real estate office located on Cobb Mt. 

I very much enjoy living in Lake County. I have always liked the equanimity and quiet environment offered by a country lifestyle out of the rat race of the city, and Lake County, and especially Cobb Mountain where I live, offers just that. Whilst conducive to a more contemplative lifestyle, it is also right on the edge of the San Francisco Bay area, one of the great cities of the world.  

My interests are meditation and yoga, and theater and acting. I also love to watch rugby, having been an avid rugby player in my youth, and always a big supporter of the New Zealand national side, the All Blacks. 

Over the years I have received tremendous financial benefits from real estate, as a salesperson, and sales manager, as well as an investor. But true success is not about money or awards, but the difference I can make in people's lives. In other words, true service. Success achieved at the cost of compromising the integrity of my principles is in fact, failure. Business is always competitive, and sometimes I have to be very assertive to protect the right interests of my clients. But I have found there is always a way to do that--a way that is ethical, lawful, and rightly in relationship to all parties. So that is my personal ongoing commitment. And it is the basis upon which Timothy Toye & Associates is based as well.