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What do you do if you are already the best real estate agent in your area, but you want more? What comes next for the best agents?
Simple: you open an office and become the best principal in your local area. Here’s how.
Cameron Crouch, now the principal at Ray White in Sherwood, Queensland, was at the stage in his real estate career where he was the dominant force in his local area – which was Graceville at the time, one suburb away from Sherwood.
His team was growing quickly and the agents working underneath him were keen to get to the next level. Mr Crouch was being approached by a lot of the other local agents asking to work with him and he had a strong desire to add property management to his real estate skill set.
So when Tony Warland, Ray White’s Queensland CEO, offered him the opportunity to open an office in Sherwood, he accepted.
“So it was very much just the fact that we were growing quite quickly,” Mr Crouch tells REB.
“If those people were to come on board it would not have been possible to be just a small team, so it may as well have been an office.”
Mr Warland advised him that sometimes opportunities come when you are not quite ready. But if it is your dream you should jump into it, because that opportunity might not be there when you are ready for it.
“I was lucky to be given the opportunity to open the office. It was a goal for me, although it was another 10 years away. But I backed myself and I had the people around me that I knew would help me,” Mr Crouch says.
Fast start
It wasn't all difficult, Mr Crouch remembers. “We actually started with a big bang, and we did very, very well for our first few months in the industry.”
But it was different, he says, because there were a lot of “other things” to learn very quickly – managing assistants, administration, property managers, and a mortgage broker as well.
“And how we did that was I employed people that actually knew that side of the business. So rather than myself going straight into it, I had key staff members that joined my team and that enabled us get off the ground very quickly.”
The biggest hurdle, Mr Crouch says – like in all offices – was hiring the right staff members and putting them in the correct positions.
“Because, as everyone knows, people have strengths and weaknesses. So everyone in the team is very valuable, it’s just a matter of finding what in their position is their best strength, more so than their weakness,” he says.
Would he do it again?
“Yes. Definitely. It was always a goal of mine to own an office by the time I was 40. I’m 31 now, so that means it has come very early, but I'd definitely do it again.
“We have a great team, great people, and we are doing really well. It has been very, very positive the last year and a half.
“We are now the number one agency within the area and we got that pretty quickly, so there have been a lot of positive outcomes from opening the business,” he said.
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