Q&A

E

g Q +

ANELSON: We are here today with my partner, my friend, power broker, Fredrik Eklund, and we’re talking about the future of real estate. EKLUND: I’m still calling myself a witch. When I was, CRYSTAL BALL Agent Seth Nelson sits down with real estate power broker and Eklund Gomes co-founder Fredrik Eklund to discuss the future of the company and real estate. Watch for the inside scoop! like, five years old, basically the same age as my kids now, I used to dress up as a witch, a male witch that could see into the future. Still in business and personal, I always feel like I can see into the future, I always know sort of what’s going to happen. It’s a very good quality. So you can ask me anything about the future. NELSON: I always say in order to talk about the future, we must first understand how we got here in the past. Let’s talk about 2021, a banner year for Eklund Gomes, almost $4.6 billion dollars in transactions. That’s a huge feat. How do you do those numbers in a year? EKLUND: We don’t call ourselves team members, we say family members, and I always say, and I will say it until I die, that’s more important than the numbers. It really is. And maybe because of the family is why we’re getting these crazy numbers. Because of the camaraderie, we take care of one another, we travel together, we go to dinners together. I mean, do we fight here and there? Maybe, but we don’t allow any negativity. And we don’t allow people to compete within the team because God knows there is so much competition going around in the industry, between teams and companies. So that is the real reason why we could do those crazy big numbers. And why we continue to beat those numbers. I don’t think I’ve

ever seen or heard of a real estate entity, team or company that call themselves — without even exaggerating, without trying to be cute or anything — family. We do. By the way, there’s nothing gimmicky about that. I came to New York, without my family back in Sweden, I felt very lonely. I’ve talked about this, it’s been highly publicized. I wrote about it in my book that I didn’t have anybody. I mean, literally nobody. In real estate as you know, the highs are high and the lows are low, it’s very a lonely industry. I started the team with John, my best friend, because I didn’t have a family. And when I went into the office in the morning, I could see my family members, a very small family at the time. And now we have a very big family. It really starts with that, it’s a real thing. I want it to be less about me, less about John, less about the founders. If we’re talking about 2.0, I want all the family members to feel like co-founders.

NELSON: Let’s talk about the future of Eklund Gomes. Right now, the team is in four states, entering a fifth with Nevada, 13 markets. What does expansion look like? EKLUND: Well, I am just one voice. We’re the co founders, John and I, but it’s really all of us that make these decisions. I really believe in this circular sort of organization, not a triangle, we’re all making these decisions together. Where we are right now, I’m really, really proud. And I don’t say that lightly. Because if I knew how hard it was to do this expansion, we might not even have done it. I mean, God knows we’re so happy that we did it. We’re capitalizing being in the best markets with all the wealth moving around. We had no idea that the expansion pre-COVID was going to be so important for us when different markets changed, and sub-markets like Malibu, the Hamptons, Palm Beach exploded. We’re in a really, really good place, we are in 13 sub-markets in four states, we’re going into, like you said, a fifth state, and we’re in all the right places and our developers, our sellers, our buyers are very much the same. We have the best condo buildings under development or on the market with some of the best hotel flags in the world. I really feel like we’re in the center of this informational money storm, and coming out of this incredibly historic year ‘21 into ‘22. And we’re already beating ‘21’s numbers. So to answer your question, with a lot of passion, as you can hear in my voice, we don’t want to double or triple in size. We want to be the best of the best. We have our own brand, and our own family energy, and that model is going to help us immensely moving forward.

NELSON: Eklund Gomes is situated in the most dynamic markets: Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Orange County, Brooklyn, Florida, Austin, Houston, Dallas. Do you think the pandemic has fueled the system that we’ve created and how that’s going to then expand into the future? EKLUND: I mean, listen, we didn’t plan what was going to happen. I guess, you know, we capitalized on what was happening during the pandemic. There was so much wealth being redistributed. Some people say there was a sort of East Coast migration to Florida. There were a lot of people going into Texas, on a whole different level than we had ever seen before. I already mentioned Malibu, the Hamptons, Palm Beach, Palm Springs — those kind of markets just exploded. OC had a lot of people moving down from LA and San Francisco because now, for the first time ever, people could live far away from work or work anywhere they want to live. It was a little bit of luck, and a lot of hard work getting into these places. Now, you know, where are we going to go from here in the future? In a post-pandemic world, I think that this trend that we’re seeing: larger lots, larger houses, larger apartments, highly-amenitized homes and buildings, more bedrooms because everybody wants a home office or a home gym. And, of course, clearly spending more of your wealth on where you live, because you can sort of work everywhere, that trend is going to continue.

To get Eklund’s thoughts on real estate marketing, insight into his quirky (and honest) social media presence, his family’s future in LA and, drum roll please, his upcoming TV project, watch the interview here.