Anne Squires takes a spin around the bay with her dog Maddie
By Kelly Putter
Ask Anne Squires why all agents aren’t jumping ship and making a beeline to her realty firm, and the real estate captain hints at a mutiny.
“We’re working on it,” she says with a tone that indicates she means business despite the humour in her voice.
And there’s no doubt the 53-year-old Newfoundlander is serious. As the owner of Exit Realty on the Rock, which encompasses seven offices in Newfoundland and is the franchisee of six more in Alberta, she’s steering her ship straight ahead.
“Tune in next year,” is her answer when asked about expansion plans. “I believe in the Exit system and if I can place an Exit banner somewhere it doesn’t have one, I’m going to do my best to do that.”
The Exit formula operates on a simple single-level residual concept. When an Exit associate introduces a sales rep who joins the company, they receive from the head office an amount equivalent to 10 per cent of that recruit’s gross commissions. This is paid to them as a thank you for helping the company grow.
It’s clearly a system that works well for Squires. The expansion into Alberta took place in the past year. Exit’s westward growth strategy parallels the migration of many of Squires’ native Newfoundlanders. The flow of workers to Alberta is phenomenal, she says, and the relocation possibilities are tremendous.
“I feel very strongly that I’m living proof that the Exit concept works,” says Squires. “So when the opportunity was there with head office to have someone bond the entire province as a region, it was pretty much a mutual agreement that I would jump in.”
Her success has been lauded numerous times both within the company and outside of it. In 2011 Squires’ 100 Newfoundland agents helped her score Exit’s top-grossing multiple offices for sales in North America. The year before that she won the company’s brokerage of the year award for top sales. This year, she was honoured to earn a spot as one of Atlantic Canada’s top 50 CEOs thanks to Atlantic Business magazine.
A seasoned real estate pro with 25 years in the business, Squires remembers the days in the mid ’80s when people purchased homes because they had a good assumable mortgage rate of – get this – 14 per cent. A rookie when she started with Re/Max in St. John’s, Squires was persistent and convinced the broker she could do the job despite her inexperience. After a fulfilling career of 17 years, she made the tough decision to break out on her own.
A straight shooter who works hard and plays hard, Squires is a realist who takes pride in the fact that most of her business comes from repeats and referrals. As we speak she takes a call on her cell phone from a client and counsels them that they don’t need to pay such a high price for a plot of commercial land they’re interested in.
“I don’t like to see my clients get stuck where they want something so bad they can taste it,” she says. “I think I’m pretty black and white when it comes to the value and the facts about a property. If somebody asks me if this property is going to increase by $20,000 in the next year, some Realtors might be tempted to say absolutely, but my response is, ‘I’d be buying it myself then.’ ”
Squires’ strong work ethic comes from her large, hard-working family who hail from Admiral’s Beach in St. Mary’s Bay, which is on the southern shore of the Avalon Peninsula. Squires, the eldest of seven, says her family lived off the land so much so that she didn’t eat her first fast-food burger until she moved to St. John’s at 16 with a measly $30 in her pocket. Back home, if she wanted to eat potatoes she had to dig for them. Her father was a fisherman so the family’s diet, Squires jokes, was fish and potatoes for dinner on Monday, and potatoes and fish on Tuesday.
It’s the kind of lifestyle that influenced her life’s work. Her motto, today and always, has been “I wouldn’t ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do myself.” She still opens and closes her 9,000 square-foot flagship office in St. John’s every day. “The comment closest to my heart that I’ve heard agents say is the hardest working person in the office is Anne.”
She knows about hard work also as a single mother, raising her daughter Jennifer Squires, a 30-year-old Realtor who dabbled in real estate long before she was licensed thanks to her mother’s influence and a cell phone she enjoyed answering. It appears Jennifer’s daughter, one-year-old Anna Sophia, may be on the same path as her favourite toy is her mother’s BlackBerry.
Squires purchased her first Exit franchise in November 2004 and quickly amassed about a dozen agents to join the company. A month or so later, at Christmas, she placed Santa-displaying billboards around St. John’s warning, “You better watch out! Exit is coming to town.”
“It was a very exciting time but at same time there were a lot of nerve-wracking moments in the first launch,” she says. “It was a whole change of pace.”
Perhaps one of nicest side effects of being a driven entrepreneur is the level of community activism Squires has engendered. Her Exit franchises have raised and contributed more than $500,000 for such charities as Daffodil Place, accommodations for out-of-town patients receiving cancer treatment, Ronald McDonald House and for the local food bank.
For Squires, who is uncomfortable tooting her own horn, the philanthropic side of her business, it turns out, has been a part of her manoeuvring all along.
“When you grow up and you don’t have a whole lot, you learn to fend for yourself and you take a few knocks along the way. Then you have some success and you recognize you have the potential to give back.”
Photos by Randy Dawe
