The real building blocks of real estate

We never know where our next customer is coming from or planning to go, but we do know that we can make the journey to their new home a lot easier and less stressful, thanks to our focus as a business on building meaningful and lasting relationships. 

I am proud to say that we see bonds continuously being created not only between our agents and customers but also between agent teams, between different branches of Chas Everitt in South Africa and between Chas Everitt and the other members of the truly global network that is Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® (LeadingRE).

 And they are certainly the bedrock of our extremely powerful national and international referral system, through which we assist dozens of customers a month to navigate sales and purchases in multiple locations, whether they are moving from Durban to Johannesburg, for example, or from Cape Town to Australia or Portugal to Pretoria.   

Because they know one another, our property professionals in one location have peace of mind that when they connect their customers to an agent in another location, that agent already shares their values and service ethic, and will treasure the relationship with that customer as much as they do.

This also creates a high level of trust and comfort for customers, who find it so much easier to relocate and acquire property in a different city or country when it is evident that both the local and remote brokerages share an understanding of their requirements and are equally invested in helping them to make a successful move.

Meanwhile for sellers, the advantage of working with a real estate brokerage that is a member of a really co-operative global network such as LeadingRE - which spans 75 countries and six continents - is that their property is bound to receive exposure to a much wider pool of potential buyers and investors than they could otherwise reach from SA.

As chairman of the LeadingRE Global Advisory Board, I think another major advantage of being a member of this network is that it is specifically made up of invited brokerages that are not only all world-class companies, but also each have an invaluable understanding of their local real estate customs, culture and procedures, which they are more than willing to use to assist and benefit each other, as well as the customers from other countries who are referred through the network.

I also know that this collaborative outlook exists primarily because the brokers and property professionals within these companies have often already met and got to know one another. Once again, it's all about relationships. Over the past eight years, for example, I have met and become friends with the heads of many other LeadingRE brokerages across the world, and can confidently refer any customer to them for help with a local property sale or purchase.   

The need for this level of reassurance and depth of local knowledge has increased in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of location-independent work, with many people semigrating within SA, for example, and a rising trend among affluent homeowners worldwide to acquire additional properties in other countries so that they will always have a "safe haven" no matter where a crisis might occur.

There are others too, who want to diversify their portfolios and have assets in several different locations, and some who have business interests in other countries or whose children are studying elsewhere and need accommodation, and the increase in all of these activities have put the real estate industry in a key position of trust that I think is going to make co-operation between reputable players across the world even more essential, but is also going to prove the value of relationship-based service.

Within LeadingRE, for example, we have now created a separate registry of many new residential projects being built and marketed specifically to foreign buyers, and are able to ask for any such project to be checked out by the local LeadingRE brokerage, so that all our customers, collectively, will be protected from buying into questionable projects. And that is definitely the power of alliance in practice.