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. 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.

Shoot the puck

Recent years have seen Royal LePage take many chances on new ideas and new technologies. www.royallepage.ca was Canada’s first national real estate portal – initially scoffed at by competitors and some of our own alike as a colossal waste of time and money. A few years later, we became the first company to build an online integrated marketing centre where our agents could create their own customized and branded sales material, twenty-four hours a day.

Of course, risk takers get the occasional bloody nose. Not everything we have tried worked – remember HomeLink? An idea ahead of its time, perhaps. What I do know is that if you never shoot the puck, you never score. Thanks to all who are willing to be ‘early adopters’ as we push boundaries in search of tomorrow’s great differentiating tools and services.

Luckily, most of our carefully considered initiatives bear fruit. The Royal LePage ‘Neighbourhood Navigator’ service redefined the way Canadian consumers research and learn about the communities they wish to consider their own. Mobile technology we launched in 2011, which featured such innovations as GPS enabled “Info+” flagged listings and won a prestigious international technology and design award.

You’ll love our neighbourhood (data)

Looking ahead to 2013, you will see amazingly innovative thinking come to life. Royal LePage web and mobile platforms will feature consumer search technology including neighbourhood ‘heat maps’ that glow with exciting property information unavailable elsewhere. New client management tools will let you generate leads from online sources like never before, and track them with relative ease.

Today’s consumer takes more time to understand the real estate market before contemplating which agent they would like to work with. Twenty years ago, consumers would do their own research for about four weeks before contacting an agent. Today, they sail solo for an average of sixteen weeks, searching for neighbourhood, school and other local information. There is a clear competitive advantage to being the company that provides homeowners with the tools they need to make more informed decisions.

We intend to present neighbourhood-level market insight online in an easy to use format, for users of both traditional and mobile devices. This will include information that matters to consumers, including illustrative charts showing neighbourhood property characteristics, people demographics such as typical languages spoken, and education levels and points of interest such as schools, shopping, hospitals and places of worship.

The year ahead will be a special one for the company and for you. The challenges are immense. It is a scary, ever-changing world – but it is a world full of opportunity for the brave and industrious. The character of our company is on display each day. Your spirit, integrity and commitment to service excellence, and your love of this industry, serve to differentiate Royal LePage from the competition.

Show me a company that has stood the test of time and I will show you a firm with innovation woven into its DNA.

Thank you for joining us on this amazing journey as we set out to write the stories of our great firm’s second century.

Phil Soper is the President and Chief Executive of Royal LePage Real Estate Services and can be reached at president@royallepage.ca.