Tav Schembri (Photos by Marko Shark)
By Susan Doran
A word of caution: If you are new to the real estate business and/or struggling to get where you want to be, sales rep Tav Schembri’s story may cause uncontrollable feelings of envy.
There is no point in sugar coating it to spare you. It would appear that this guy must regularly skip through meadows of four-leaved clover and collect lucky rabbits’ feet by the truckload. But as we’ll see, he makes his own luck.
Take note that 2013 was Schembri’s first full year in the real estate business. He got his license in the fall of 2012. He has already sold over $75 million in property, is among the top-performing Re/Max salespeople in Canada and has been inducted into the company’s elite platinum, president’s and chairman’s clubs, which are reserved for those who earn over $500,000 in commissions. This ranks him among the fastest Realtors ever to obtain Re/Max’s top sales awards.
Let’s not overlook the fact that this “rookie” Realtor has already handled one of the largest sales ever – a whopping $50+ million – in the Brampton. Ont. area.
Schembri is loving all of it. “I hate going to bed at night and can’t wait to wake up in the morning,” he says.
He’s aware that he has an advantage over many other new sales reps in that he is 54-years-old with plenty of previous contacts and business experience on which to draw. He has lived in Ontario’s affluent Brampton/Caledon area – within an hour’s drive of Toronto – for the past 30 years and for many of those years he ran a thriving network of hair salons.
“A lot of my clients now were previous customers,” he says. “You can make the transition to the higher levels of real estate quite quickly and I had experience which speeded things up. Having been a hair stylist, I am used to dealing with people on a regular basis and making them comfortable. I am able to read body language.”
Even before becoming a Realtor, Schembri was blessed with an eye for real estate investments. He and his wife Maria (now his property stager) got such a successful return on one of these – a large parcel of land in burgeoning Brampton – that they could have retired immediately, Schembri says. He took that opportunity to re-evaluate what he wanted career-wise. He had already sold off most of his hair salons but still owned one, although he was finding it harder to do work as a stylist due to a serious accident with a table saw, which cost him several fingers.
The upshot was that he investigated the real estate field and was presented with the rare opportunity to open a Re/Max Realty Specialists satellite office out of the existing Caledon location where he had run his remaining hair salon. In this way he was able to service the same clients in the same safe, green and prosperous farming and residential area he’d been working in for decades, as well as broadening his existing reach to include developers interested in acquiring land.
He recalls being extremely nervous throughout his first listing presentation, hoping that the clients wouldn’t ask him how much experience he had.
“I was dreading that.”
He did wind up telling them. They “were in shock” but continued on with him as their Realtor, he says.
Within a few months he had a large sale – a $7-million farm in Caledon – and “things started snowballing from there,” he says.
That’s quite an understatement. This newbie Realtor soon made the largest sale ever seen to that point in Brampton.
“It was between $50 million and $60 million,” he says. “It was a weird thing. I was working in my office and these builders came in and were inquiring about the area….”
Eventually, this initial meeting led to the builders purchasing a 98-acre farm property for development, making Schembri the happiest rookie Realtor around.
Having those builders walk into his office out of the blue was a lucky break. But like most highly successful people, Schembri is competitive and tends to work hard so as to make his own luck.
“When I get into something I go head first,” he states. “For example, I’m a squash player and when I first started playing I could not get enough of it. In my first year I went from learning the game to being at the top of my club level.”
Over the years he has coached his three (now grown up) children in many sports. He recalls an iconic incident when the family first took up skiing.
“I’d try to get them to always be the best in everything and in kids’ sports that meant the rep level,” he says. “When we got into skiing, the first thing I did was try to get them to sign up for lessons. They said, ‘Dad, we don’t want lessons. We don’t want to be competitive skiers. We just want to have fun.’”
Schembri is well aware that as in squash and other sports, strategy is a key component of success in real estate.
“Visibility is important,” he says. “No one has as many 4 X 8 signs in the area as me… Technology is a big part of it too. Today you have to have social networking skills.”
When asked about his advice for new sales reps, he stresses the importance of being honest and earning the trust of clients. “If you are totally honest, the client sees that,” he says. “I put all the information on the table.”
He is now at the point, after only a year and a half in the business, of having more success than he ever imagined. Although new to real estate, he is already talking about becoming a coach.
“I know that sounds strange,” he says, “but in real estate, everything is possible.”
