From left: Penny Kiely, Brad Robinson (owner of the property), Maxine Reid, John O’Rourke (broker of record) and Elissa Boughen.
Great minds, as the saying goes, think alike. Realtors Penny Kiely and Maxine Reid worked together years ago, but drifted apart. A search for new office space brought them back together.
Kiely and Reid had worked for Bowes and Cocks in Dorset, Ont. for many years, starting when the office first opened in 1988. They weren’t a team, but Kiely says they worked well together.
In 1997 Kiely “took a sabbatical and adopted a couple of kids.” After a management change at Bowes and Cocks, Reid moved on to a local Chestnut Park office. All the while, the original office, which Kiely’s father had built as a real estate office for his daughter, remained vacant.
Five years later, when Kiely decided to return to work, she went to check it out. Unbeknownst to her, Reid was also looking at the same office space because Chestnut Park had closed its local office. When the two Realtors found out they were looking at the same property, they decided to open the office together.
Royal LePage Lakes of Muskoka Realty Brokerage, Dorset “re-opened” in March 2012. The broker of record is John O’Rourke and they hired a new agent, Dorset resident Elissa Boughen, after she obtained her real estate licence last July. Kiely has been a Realtor for more than 30 years and Reid for 23 years.
Their office is housed in a Viceroy model home. “It’s different than most offices because it’s got the feel of a home,” Kiely says. “It has cathedral ceilings, three offices and an open area. We hang the pictures differently, but it’s basically the same office” as when it was Bowes and Cocks.
It overlooks the Lake of Bays and up a hill to the Dorset Lookout Tower. It can be seen from Highway 35 and is an easy walk for those in the downtown core, she says.
The office is in the small but busy tourist town on Lake of Bays. “It’s a lucrative and big geographic area,” she says.
Kiely’s office serves the northern Haliburton and Muskoka area. “We specialize in recreational properties. We’re well-dressed bush bunnies who show properties by snowmobile and snowshoe. We have a Royal LePage boat. We’re into Algonquin activities. That’s the kind of Realtors we are. We dress up, but a lot of times we’re in jeans and hiking boots.”
They sell properties priced from $100,000 to several millions of dollars, she says. “We have different sizes of lakes and different sizes of pocketbooks.”
To help spread the word about their “reopening”, the Realtors had a float in this year’s Dorset Winter Carnival. “The idea is to bring tourist dollars into the local economy and we wanted to make it a vibrant and fun affair,” Kiely says. – Connie Adair
