Message from the President Royal LePage – 100 Years of Helping You Home One hundred years of helping you home. These seven simple words convey much about us and about our great company: enduring success; a client-centric culture that puts the needs of those we serve ahead of our own; and the importance of family and community. I recently introduced this as the theme of our 2013 centennial celebrations to an animated gathering of the Royal LePage faithful at our national conference in Vancouver. As we enter our 100th year as Canada’s real estate company, this is the foundation upon which Royal LePage continues to grow and flourish in a rapidly changing industry and world. Celebrating 100 Over the coming year, we will chronicle the contributions of the many who have stepped before us to create our iconic Canadian brand. We will have an opportunity to reflect, to highlight the expansion of the company through its middle years, take an honest look at how Royal LePage stumbled and could have perished – before reinventing itself and embarking on the strongest period of growth in company history over the past decade. This is our time to celebrate our successes, crystallize in our own minds what makes us so different, and build upon a wave of collective confidence. Our centennial celebrations will include consumer and agent contests, gala celebrations at our awards events, and festivities nationwide. Newly produced videos will reflect on our rich past and look ahead to the challenges to come; public relations programs will use our place as the ‘voice of Canadian real estate’ to share our stories and insight into the changing world of real estate brokerage; and trade advertising programs will feature pride pieces aimed at key target audiences. We will even publish a book chronicling the past ten decades. Driven to be better For me, our 100th anniversary is a time for personal reflection. The fall of 2012 coincides with my 10th year as President of Royal LePage. I feel tremendously fortunate to have been part of one of Canada’s great companies for the last decade, for both the triumphs and the challenges. It has been a period of tremendous prosperity for the Royal LePage family, but also an unsettled time for our industry as Realtors® grapple with new competitors and the changing demands of the marketplace.
2 | Royal LePage Leading Edge | 2013
New technologies have helped us do our jobs more quickly and efficiently and they have opened doors for consumers to take a more active role in the process of buying and selling property. Many view this as a doubleedged sword. An educated, empowered client is more prone to ask tough questions about the value that their advisor provides. I see this as a great opportunity for Royal LePage professionals to develop their skills and leverage the resources the company provides them, in order to differentiate themselves from the thousands of agents in this country who will simply not survive the transformation. Very few organizations last more than a generation, let alone one hundred years. Show me a company that has stood the test of time and I will show you a firm with innovation woven into its DNA; an organization that attracts people who thrive on taking risks, people driven to make things better.
