By Susan Doran
Jason Atkins with the car “every guy wanted” growing up. (Photo by Marko Shark)
Jason Atkins is well aware that his red 1963 Corvette convertible is a car that “every guy wanted” growing up. It’s the realization of a boyhood dream, he says. It’s also a manifestation of his extreme will to succeed.
Atkins, a father of two who has been a Realtor for 25 years, has been HomeLife’s top sales rep in Canada for the past seven years. He’s with Homelife/Bayview Realty, which services a portion of the Greater Toronto Area that includes Richmond Hill, Thornhill, Vaughan, Aurora, Newmarket, Markham and North York. It’s a mega-office, and like Atkins, is a star performer for the franchise.
It should come as no surprise that a guy like Atkins is driven. His speech is peppered with sentences like, “All obstacles are self imposed.” Or, “Every morning when you wake up you have a blank cheque, and you can put the number on that. That’s what real estate is all about if you work hard.”
He talks about being so determined that when he started out in real estate, he would cold call all day and night – before laws prohibited that.
Thanks to a background that saw him on the front lines of early real estate niche advertising and pre-construction condo sales, with mentors such as father Lee and brother Martin, both of whom were hugely successful Realtors and sales trainers, Atkins is a skilled negotiator and a savvy marketer.
“At 23 I was responsible for a client base that sold more than $200 million annually in housing sales,” he says. “That exposed me to real estate marketing at a high level.” Now that websites and social marketing have become fundamental marketing tools, “the reach is amazing,” he says.
He explains that although his website is now his “No. 1 engine for new business” (his other marketing strategies include social marketing, direct mail, transit bench ads, outdoor ads and cultural marketing in international publications), he gets so antsy when he has to sit still for more than 10 minutes that he’ll still occasionally go and knock on doors in his neighbourhood, pumping hands and handing out flyers.
After interviewing him for this article, in short order this writer received several texts from Atkins and an email, describing various points and people he’d like mentioned, and suggesting a headline REM might want to consider using. It was this sort of intense controlling focus that eight years ago initially made it hard for him to accept that he needed to incorporate team members into his growing business.
“I always wanted to do things myself. I had trouble delegating. The last year I worked by myself I did 100 ends – that’s a lot! All the feature sheets and administrative functions I did myself.”
He finally figured out that it was time to team up with other Realtors. “As soon as I did that I was No. 1 in Canada, as I was able to do the income-producing functions myself instead of running around like a courier,” he says.
During the past five years, the average production of his 10-person team (all of whom are full-time and licensed) has been approximately $100 million annually, he says.
“The way it works,” he says, “is that if one of the agents who works with me has their own client, they will work with that client – if there’s a need for me to be involved, I’m happy to do so. If the agent brings in new business, then it’s me and them working on the listing together.”
He believes that for lead agents, having a team makes sense. “But I see a lot of teams with a lot of turnover,” he says. “The biggest problem is finding the balance between the number of sales associates on a team and the amount of business – it has to be enough to support the whole team.”
The turnover on his own team is low; many of his sales associates have been with him for years, he says. He tries to steer clear of hiring new agents, as he wants his sales associates to be able to work independently, he adds.
“I do a huge amount of marketing,” he says. “That’s really the whole idea – to have experienced, successful, competent agents in their own right to help create the brand.”
As the area they service is multi-cultural, Atkins’ team has members fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Russian, Persian, French, Hebrew, Urdu and Hindi. (He personally does his best just to speak English coherently, he says, laughing.)
He hasn’t always been as successful. At one point, after being involved in a storefront pizza venture in downtown Toronto, he lost everything, he says.
“I want new agents to understand that although I’ve built a successful business, it didn’t start that way. I’ve been to the Insta-Bank when there’s no money there. That instils a will to succeed – I never want to experience it again.”
It didn’t hurt either, he says, that in the early days his wife Kelly would pack him a nice lunch and then tell him not to come home without a listing or a sale. “My greatest achievement in real estate was meeting her,” he says. “She worked with my brother Martin.”
He also gives credit to his mother, “Frances Atkins, who is 88-years-old and my biggest supporter. She passes out my business cards at her seniors’ workshops and retirement residence.”
In the end, success in real estate is all about how hard you’re prepared to work, in his opinion.
“If you work hard and put your head down for five years, you can make six figures,” he says. “Very few businesses are that democratic. Some of the highest-producing agents came here with nothing and five years later are hugely successful.
“What’s stopping you?”
