Nevin Hollett, left and Craig Williams (Photos by Randy Dawe)
By Susan Doran
An unlikely mix of youth and experience has turned out to be a winning combination for the Newfoundland-based Williams-Hollett Sales Team, which is Realty Executive’s top team worldwide. Team principals Craig Williams and Nevin Hollett say their team sold about 250 homes in the St. John’s area in 2011, beating out approximately 600 other Realty Executive franchises spanning 27 countries.
Williams is 53 – old enough to recall a time when neither real estate teams nor cell phones existed. He remembers lugging around a pocketful of dimes for pay phones and laughs when he talks about the immense size of the first cell phones.
Hollett is 29. In a no-nonsense tone, he details the importance of digital and solution-based real estate marketing, comments on the “refreshment of inventory” currently available in the St. John’s market, and reels off facts and figures relating to the strong market there.
The two appear, at least initially, to be about as different as two business partners can be. But the fact is, they’ve worked together in one capacity or another since Hollett was fresh out of university. Williams, a broker and long-time top-producing Realtor who is current president of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association of Newfoundland and Labrador (CHBA NL), has owned businesses in virtually all sectors of the real estate industry. He knows a good thing when he sees it – he purchased the Realty Executives of St. John’s franchise in 2005 and several years later became business partners with Hollett, having recognized the younger man’s sales and marketing skills.
With Williams providing experience and Hollett coming up with fresh new approaches, the pair has always found their age difference to be a benefit, they say.
Adds Hollett, “I’m more current regarding technology.”
He gets no argument there from Williams, who freely admits to being the team “dud” where technology is concerned.
“I work best with intelligent young people. They’re smart and enjoy the benefit of my experience…and don’t want my job yet!” he says, laughing.
Besides being No. 1 world-wide for the Realty Executive franchise, the Williams-Hollett team – comprised of eight full-time licensed agents and half a dozen support staff – was named the No. 1 Canadian team for 2010 and 2011, and was also selected as sales team of the year for outstanding new home construction sales and marketing for the past two years by the CHBA NL.
Williams says, “We’re all about systems and service,” when asked the secret of the team’s success.
“Our system is built strictly on service and not on numbers. What eight agents can do today if managed properly, it would take 40 to do before. It’s about leveraging people and technology…Lead generation is a huge part of our system. We do a lot of tracking – for instance of advertising – to see what works for our clients.”
Their methods are program focused, he and Hollett say. They have taken a page from real estate guru Craig Proctor, offering such incentives as a guaranteed sale program (wherein they buy any home that’s listed with them and doesn’t sell), a buy-back guarantee that’s valid for one year and programs for buyers that involve the possibility of obtaining a mortgage with no down payment.
“Historically the norm in real estate is that agents spend 80 per cent of their time prospecting. Ours spend 100 per cent of their time selling,” says Williams. “The prospecting is done for them. We offer team supports, a team approach, so everyone has a job to do. It’s a much more systematic approach to selling real estate.”
The real estate market is “splendid” in St. John’s, helping the team become the No. 1 Realty Executives franchise worldwide.
Hollett says this means the licensed Realtors on the team don’t need to worry about getting ads in the paper or about accounting, or ordering signs or doing paperwork.
“Our agents do not prospect,” he says. “They’re supplied with constant leads through our unique consumer programs, so they don’t need to worry.”
All of the team’s marketing is web-focused, he continues. “Everything – including our print and radio marketing – refers back to our website,” he says.
As for the challenges Realtors face in the St. John’s market, Williams and Hollett say that growth in St. John’s has lead to urban sprawl. “If someone wants to be in the middle of the city in a home less than five years old, it doesn’t exist,” says Hollett. He and Williams add that the labour market in St. John’s is another issue. It’s so strong that getting work completed can be difficult.
“At one point it was taking almost a year to build a house. It’s about six months now,” says Hollett. “We’ve got a red-hot labour market and great population growth, so skilled labour is under-supplied. If you want a fence built, it might take six months.”
The market in St John’s started picking up in 2007, Williams says. “Now it’s splendid, which has been good for the psyche of Newfoundlanders. There are engineers everywhere because there’s so much oil…The population has increased…Housing prices have gone up and so have incomes. Anybody who wants to work in St. John’s right now is working,” he says.
Asked about the challenges that real estate teams face in St. John’s or any market, Hollett notes that they have to be run like a business.
“You need a consistent approach. You can’t shut down for a month and go to Florida, like a solo agent. You need a constant flow of activity; your overhead is much higher. In our case our marketing is based off of reverse prospecting. We let the prospects come to us through our marketing programs and solutions…
“The biggest thing I attribute our success to is the marketing services we provide to buyers and sellers,” he says. “We don’t think as Realtors. We think as marketers. That’s our focus… good ad copy, good website, good programming.”
