Realtor breaks the mould

A Queenstown tourism business broker’s embarked on a parallel career with the world’s fastest-growing residential and commercial real estate company.

Tourism Properties.com’s Adrian Chisholm’s the first New Zealand agent to join United States-based eXp — described as the first global brokerage to shift from a bricks-and-mortar model to a cloud-based one.

Chisholm says ‘‘I’ve never seen a business model as good in 50 years in business’’.

The 68-year-old, who’s been involved in tourism/hospitality management, property development — he developed Queenstown’s O’Connell’s Shopping Centre in the ’80s — and real estate, says he’d been looking for ‘‘a parallel business in real estate to keep me busy during the next few years’’.

That’s because, due to Covid, he says it’ll take a while for tourism/hospo businesses to become profitable, and therefore saleable, again.

‘‘I saw the headline, ‘No bricks-and-mortar real estate juggernaut coming to NZ’, and I thought, ‘that’s interesting’.’’

Chisholm says when he set up Tourism Properties.com in 2007, that was the catalyst for the law to be changed to allow brokers to operate from home — ‘‘the old law said you had to physically supervise your salespeople in the building you occupied’’.

What he likes about eXp is ‘‘it gives us a global network with 83,000 agents, and when we list our properties in NZ, they automatically get put up into 33 other countries’’.

He also cites the company’s ‘‘most sophisticated back-of-house system in the real estate world’’.

However, what most appeals, he says, is eXp ‘‘cuts away all the fat’’, meaning agents have control, and flexibility, over the
commissions they charge, which in turn benefits vendors.

With NZ real estate franchises, he explains, the franchisor deducts about 9%.

Of the remaining 91%, the franchisee takes 50%, with the other 50% split between the listing agent and the selling agent, meaning each agent gets about 23%.

Chisholm believes this ‘bricks-and-mortar’ model is becoming a dinosaur — ‘‘think taxi v Uber, Video Ezy v Netflix, hotel rooms v Airbnb’’.

By contrast, he says an eXp agent gets 75% of the commission, and the head office the balance, but that becomes 100% once they pay an annual fee of $35,000.

The agent also receives a $1250 bonus on each settled contract.

Chisholm will post his first listings on the eXp website in the next few weeks, initially, selling residential, lifestyle and rural properties, and will expand on that next year.

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