By Kathy Bevan
As anyone who lives on Vancouver Island will tell you, the big draw there is the lifestyle. Anchored by Victoria in the south, with its major airport and marine harbour, Mount Washington with its ski slopes to the north, the Gulf Islands to the east and Pacific Rim surf to the west, the island offers a work and play environment matched by few other locales in North America.
Randy Forbes (photo by David Hayward)
As general manager of Coast Realty Group, the largest independent real estate company based on the island, Randy Forbes not only sells the island lifestyle to homebuyers, he lives it himself. Forbes makes his home off a golf course five minutes from his Nanaimo office; he has a ski chalet up the side of Mount Washington, which this winter had one of the highest snow bases in North America; and one January weekend this year, when parts of Canada were enduring sub-zero temperatures, he had to decide whether to go golfing with his buddies or skiing on the mountain.
As for his real estate business – all 13 of Coast Realty’s offices made a profit in 2009, a year that began in the doldrums but ended on a high on western Canada’s coastline.
“We basically hunkered down and tried to predict how long things were going to go sideways,” says Forbes. He says a big plus for the Vancouver Island firm is its business model, which “internalizes” all of the company’s monies. “Coast Realty has no franchise fees to pay, no head office to support – everything we have is inside the Coast envelope and we can adjust that pretty easily. That carried us through until things started to take off again and 2009 ended up being a great year for all of our offices.”
Coast Realty was formed in 1984 by a group of six salespeople from three different Nanaimo-area real estate companies and became the number one office in that market. When the original six found it difficult to try to grow the business as well as work as salespeople, they called Forbes and asked if he’d like to head up their operations.
At the time, Forbes was managing the NRS Block Bros. office in Campbell River, north up the coast from Nanaimo. He was familiar with the Nanaimo area however; he had moved there as a teenager from the Prairies and obtained his Realtor’s license in that city in 1976. He was a manager for Block Bros. (and then NRS Block Bros.) in both Nanaimo and Campbell River for 14 years and was interested in taking on the challenge of growing an independent real estate company on the island.
He also liked the company’s business model. “Because it was started by six salespeople, the core of everything they did was related to the best interests of the salesperson – rather than being top down, it was bottom up.” Forbes became general manager in 1993 and, within 10 years, Coast Realty had expanded up and down the island, with some 250 salespeople working out of over a dozen offices.
The business model remained centred on the salesperson. “In many respects, it’s an old-fashioned style of company, more based on people – it’s not corporate. We’ve got non-selling managers in most of our offices. Most people who start here, end here quite happily.”
The company has also made it profitable for its staff to remain with the firm. Whenever Coast Realty opened a new office, the company gave salespeople and managers the option to buy shares, in either the brokerage or its building.
“We own most of our buildings, so we become our own tenant and pay ourselves rent – a fair market rent – no matter what the marketplace is like,” says Forbes. “Over the past two or three years, as we’ve started to pay our buildings off, we’ve started to return an income to all the partners who bought in.”
Forbes also created an RSP eligible mortgage investment corporation for his salespeople and staff about 13 years ago. Since then, he estimates that CRG Mortgage Investment Corporation has provided average returns of slightly below 10.5 per cent to its 49 Coast Realty shareholders. “We fund developments, we fund construction, and we fund people who can’t qualify other ways but have a great equity position. It’s been a very powerful, very successful operation.”
Consumers appear to like the company too – its website averages 25,000 to 30,000 unique visits and approximately eight million ‘hits’ per month. Coast Realty posts comparative sales information and uploads their own listings to their website as soon as the managing broker signs off on the data. “We send it at the same time to MLS, but MLS may take one, two, three, five days to get the data up and running,” says Forbes. “Waiting up to five days in our world is a lifetime. Our sellers really like knowing their listings are on our website right away.”
So far, 2010 is proving to be another good year for Coast Realty. “We see that continuing, aside from the regular bumps in the road, probably for next five to 10 years, as in-migration continues to carry on, with fewer people leaving and more people coming to the island.”
Forbes doesn’t anticipate having to grow his operations any further to meet the needs of the markets Coast Realty serves. “I’ve seen people expand beyond their capabilities and there’s no win in that. Victoria would be a natural for us to be interested in, but there are a couple of great independents in Victoria and we’re better to send our clients to them,” Forbes says. He still gets calls from people asking to open new offices, but he has a standard response. “I say to people who call that bigger’s not better, better is better. We have a pretty good operation now – we just want to continue to get really good what we’re doing.”
