Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® (LeadingRE) is the home of the world’s market-leading independent residential brokerages in over 60 countries. Last year was another impressive year for the firm and they kicked off 2017 by appointing ground breaking financial journalist Marci Rossell as the company’s first chief economist.
Chris Dietz, LeadingRE’s Executive Vice President of Global Operations, talks to Dot Property about the company’s successful 2016 and what’s in store for 2017.
Last year was a historic one for LeadingRE, what were some of the most notable achievements? Is there anything you are particularly proud of?
Yes, 2016 was another fantastic year for us. I think the most notable achievement was that our network generated over 30,000 leads, client introductions, and we managed to push our referral conversion rate of closed transactions from 43 percent to an industry leading 52 percent!
Besides that, now having representation in 62 countries has marked another milestone for our organization, and we successfully introduced our new re-freshened brand in October during our Global Symposium in Amsterdam. And because one of our hallmarks is quality, we are very proud that we were recently ranked the #3 learning organization out of the top 125 by Training Magazine, reflecting our focus on continually raising the performance bar.
Looking ahead to 2017, can you share some of LeadingRE’s plans for this year?
2017 will also be the year of continuing globalization of our entire organization.
At LeadingRE, we are committed to creating a truly global organisation. We recognise the fact that business is done very differently in many parts of the world. One of our slogans is ‘We’re Local, we’re Global.’ We believe that a global company is a local company… but with connections everywhere.
We successfully apply different business models in different parts of the world and encourage our affiliates to share their best practices with the entire network using the products, tools and services we provide for them. Being global is also about the mindset of each staff member and affiliate, and we plan to strengthen that global mindset by providing even more training and education. Other plans include adding more quality real estate companies to the network, generating increased referral business and building our brand, especially in the APAC region.
Does the company have any goals in Asia this year? Can you offer a little insight as to what some of those goals are?
Yes, certainly we have plans for Asia in 2017. We will continue our branding campaign with Dot Property, as we understand the importance of a quality brand within the Asian cultures, even though we will always remain the global brand behind a successful local brand. With this, we hope to attract more quality real estate operations to the network and expand in further markets so our existing members have reliable partners to send their clients. To better service the region, we are considering hiring staff to work out of our Singapore office.
We are also considering customising a compelling value proposition for real estate project developers in the region to connect with us and our 128,000 agents worldwide on a global platform.
LeadingRE rapidly expanded its footprint in 2016 and now has members in more than 60 countries. Are there any Southeast Asian markets LeadingRE is targeting this year? Could we see further expansion into the region?
We are very interested in expanding our footprint in the Southeast Asian region. According to statistics of the ASEAN organization, Southeast Asia is the world’s growth region. Figures shown during a meeting in Bangkok last year were quite exciting. It is predicted that the middle class in Asia will overtake the US and European middle class in numbers by 2020 and will have almost twice as many middle-class people as Europe and the US combined!
Can you imagine the buying power? By 2030 Indonesia will overtake Germany and Japan as big middle class spenders, closing in on China, India and the US. The Philippines had a bigger GDP growth rate than China in 2016.
So yes, back to the question, Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as Vietnam and Thailand, are in our focus as we already see a lot of our business going towards these countries. It seems natural that we are looking to add quality companies from those countries to our global network of independent real estate firms.
Is there anything else you wish to share with readers about LeadingRE or the company’s aims moving forward?
I often realise that it is not easy to understand our business model from an outsider’s perspective. LeadingRE is a global network of independent, “private label” real estate companies mainly functioning like a B2B club generating business opportunities for its members. Currently we have over 4000 offices in 62 countries, and our affiliated companies generate USD 351 billion in transactions annually, closing over one million deals per year. While our members/affiliates enjoy the freedom and flexibility of being independent, we offer products, tools and services only a global organization can provide. Our mantra is ‘making the best real estate companies even better.’
As a long term aim, I’d say we want to become widely recognised as the premier global real estate network.
For more information on LeadingRE, visit www.leadingre.com