Mission: Build an information-driven real estate firm that connects brokers with buyers
Assets: Strong relationships developed during careers in the medical supply and commercial real estate sectors
Yield: A new commercial brokerage with 10 brokers and sights on national expansion
By Peter Mitham
Shortly after he finished his bachelor’s degree at Simon Fraser University in 1993, David England attended a lunch arranged by his father with a local businessman.
His father, Ken England, a broker for Colliers International, thought his son would benefit from the wisdom of someone older. The younger England, like many university grads, was more keen to pursue his dreams but headed over to Yew at the Four Seasons for the lunch.
Joe Segal was waiting. Segal told the young England that if he really wanted to make his mark, he should run his own business.
The advice came back to England, now 43, when he left the medical supply business in 2006 to work with his father at Colliers International. England’s long-time friend and software developer Grant Wilson offered to develop a website for the Englands.
“There really wasn’t anyone at the time that had a commercial [real estate] website,” England said.
Commercial brokers, unlike residential brokers, typically operate under the wing of a brokerage house with very little leeway given to building their own brand. But the quality of the leads that began rolling in for the Englands through the site Wilson designed prompted England to think a viable business might be possible if Wilson’s service could be made the basis of a new web-savvy brokerage.
“We could probably build a pretty solid business around that if we were to start our own real estate brokerage and have the business supported by this proprietary software system that happened to generate a bunch of great leads,” England said. “It all went back to that discussion I had with Joe Segal 20 years ago: how can you turn a great idea into a business?”
England provided financing to Wilson for the launch of Eco Realty Inc., a residential firm, in 2007. A holding company, Eco Realty Canada Inc., was incorporated in 2008, and in 2010, England joined as chairman and head of the venture’s commercial division.
The venture began attracting respected commercial brokers such as Nhi Denis and Dan Schulz (also Colliers alumni), setting the stage for this spring’s launch of HQ Real Estate Services Inc. with England as president.
The businesses now have 13,000 square feet at two locations in Vancouver and 47 brokers, including such well-known names as apartment brokers David and Mark Goodman.
The “great idea” behind the residential and commercial divisions is simple.
Buyers want information and brokers want leads. Eco Realty’s software seeks to deliver both. The listings, which also draw from the MLS database, make as much information as possible available to online search engines, while inquiries from prospective clients are quickly routed to the broker responsible.
Wilson, a former residential realtor with a clear aptitude for software development, knows buyers are looking for properties, not realtors, when they go online. But the software underpinning Eco Realty ensures customers reach the brokers who can handle them with less hassle. That speeds deal velocity.
“What we’re trying to do is lower our conversion ratio,” Wilson explained. “We’re now down to about 68 [visits per lead], and we think we can get it down to about 55 visits for one lead.”
England touts the venture, somewhat ambitiously, as the Google of real estate.
But the site also features a feed of new listings, which is what people are looking for after they’ve gone through the existing inventory, making it more like Facebook or the Vancouver-based dating site Plenty of Fish. A better metaphor might be to call it a networking site for people looking to connect with property.
With more than 2,000 visitors a day spending an average of 10 minutes on Eco Realty’s site, and each visitor viewing about 18 listings per visit, the site excites consultants such as Ben Nyland, president of Rampworth Capital Services Inc. in North Vancouver.
Nyland helped develop financial projections for Eco Realty and develop the pitch England and Wilson made to the venture’s initial investors, who have since anted up $2 million for the venture. HQ’s launch this spring is a further evolution of the initial idea.
“It’s a very promising company,” Nyland said. “They’re going to change the way commercial real estate is done in Vancouver.”
While most shops are relatively closed with a few key players and tight controls on information flows, Nyland said England and Wilson have harnessed their personal understanding of the real estate industry and web savvy to open the transaction process to greater buyer participation.
“What Eco Realty and HQ are bringing is a really solid understanding both of how the web works, in terms of how people are searching, as well as ... how the real estate industry works,” Nyland said. “They’re doing a great job of bringing the two together in a way that just naturally fits with the way people want to find real estate and do business.”
The brokers attracted to the business bear this out, Nyland added. England’s relationships with the commercial industry have been fundamental to garnering that support.
“He’s very well-respected in the industry,” Nyland said, citing England’s work at Colliers both with his father and on his own.
England was introduced to Rampworth through a friend of his father, while his own connections allowed England to attract many of the brokers now working for HQ Real Estate.
England is quieter about his connections with investors, saying only that they’re well-known locally but prefer to maintain a low profile. He feels it’s just a matter of time before regulators require reciprocity agreements between the country’s 93 real estate boards, a move that would open the door to the roll-out of Eco Realty’s platform nationwide.
“We’re planning on expanding the company across Canada, and we’ll be raising more capital and bringing in more investors as we do that,” he said, optimistically. “We want to give consumers the information that they’re looking for, and we want to make it fast and easy for them to find the information that they want regarding real estate.”