It would be a safe bet to say that brain surgeons could sell real estate but a real estate professional cannot do brain surgery – or at least they better not!
Tony Ma has done both and while he would be the first to admit that selling homes is not exactly brain surgery, he considers the real estate business to be challenging, stimulating and extremely satisfying. He would agree with the Chinese proverb that “it is not the knowing that is difficult, but the doing.”
Born in 1965 in the Central China city of Zhengzhou, Ma attended medical school in 1986 and following graduation, he and his wife Melody moved south to Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, where he worked as a general practitioner before becoming a neurosurgeon. When Melody, who worked for the Bank of China, expressed a desire to move to the “peaceful, multi-cultural country of Canada” where she heard it is a good place to raise children, she and Tony agreed to settle in Toronto in the late 1990s. His brother has lived in Ottawa since 1985. When Dr. Ma realized it would be a long and protracted process to become a neurosurgeon in Canada, he decided to give real estate a try.
He began selling real estate in 2000, and four years later he and Melody launched HomeLife Landmark Realty with a staff of 10. Today, with headquarters in Markham and an office in Mississauga, the firm has more than 920 agents.
Melody Lao, Lucy Li Liu and Tony Ma
While Melody is currently focused on raising their 10-year-old child (the couple also has a 25-year-old), Ma’s brokerage and his managers and agents are thriving on a threefold philosophy based on “professionalism, multiculturalism and teamwork.” Those principles have resulted in the brokerage winning a multitude of awards in the past 11 years, including the No. 1 HomeLife office in Canada in 2013 and 2014. One of his sales reps, Lucy Li Liu, was named HomeLife’s No. 1 sales representative in Canada last year.
Andrew Cimerman, founder and CEO of HomeLife Realty Services, says Tony Ma’s intelligence, commitment, passion and affability give him an unmatched affinity for the real estate business. “I know he has the ability and drive to expand his business to 1,000 agents and more,” he says. “In addition to his enormous business success, Tony is a tremendous and humble human being.”
When asked for his recipe for success, Ma implies that success is often disguised as hard work and diligence. “My mangers and agents work very hard; they work long hours and they work smart to achieve the amazing results they do,” he says, which is mindful of the Chinese proverb that “a person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.”
Markham’s population of over 300,000 is made up of nearly 40 per cent of Chinese origin and 19 per cent South Asian. About 65 per cent of HomeLife Landmark Realty’s agents are Chinese, and 90 per cent are bilingual, speaking English and Mandarin (or Cantonese.) Ma says that Asians “are rooted to the neighbourhood” and less than five per cent of his business comes directly from China. “Most of our clients are Chinese who are already landed immigrants or Chinese-Canadian citizens,” he says. “Our clientele is across the board, from Vietnamese and Italians to Filipinos and Portuguese, and my agents live and work all over the GTA and Golden Horseshoe area, focusing on residential resale homes and new condo projects and some commercial.”
This summer, Ma and six of his agents joined senior executives from Baker Real Estate and some developers to travel to Shanghai and Beijing for a two-week tour to study the expanding Chinese market with its great potential. “It was my first time back in China and my basic purpose was to learn what the people think of our Canadian product,” he says. But he also gave a sales pitch on investing in Canadian real estate. In a speech delivered in Mandarin at Beijing’s Fairmont Hotel, he praised Toronto and its people while also covering such topics as immigration and bank loan procedures.
He believes that stock market turmoil in China does not deter people in that country who want to invest in Canada. “They already have connections and strong ties in Canada,” he says. “Many are either planning to emigrate here or are already Canadian citizens who may have returned to work in China and might have children attending high school or university in Canada.”
Ma regards his sales agents as his “most valuable assets” and he tries to interview every new agent to determine their character and ask about their work habits and lifestyle. “In return, we provide them with training, support, resources, encouragement and mentoring.” He points to his star agent, Lucy Li Liu, as the kind of salesperson he seeks: one who shares in personal success and disappointments and who works for the benefit of all.
Liu studied business management at university in China and moved to Canada in 1999, joining the real estate business in 2005. “Client education is a process,” she says. “I like to provide options and let them select and compare the services they want.”
She says her fundamental principles are “honesty, professionalism and dedication. I work on this daily.” Liu adds that her success is largely a result of the “great support” she receives from teams at the brokerage and fellow agents.
Ma lists training and technology as two of the tools that will see his brokerage continue to “grow strong and solid” and help achieve the goal of increased production and sales volume. HomeLife Landmark Realty uses such technological tools as electronic signatures on transactions; direct deposit wired to the brokerage’s trust account; and posting listings on WeChat, which is a mobile text and video message communication service developed in China in 2011. It has 438 million active users, including 70 million outside of China.
The former neurosurgeon, who says his past career trained him to understand people and the way they think, is happiest when his brokerage gets repeat business based on the reputation of his salespeople, and when other agents come to him asking to work for his brokerage. It reminds one of the ancient Chinese proverb: “Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come.”
Dennis McCloskey is a contributing writer for REM.
