Personal tragedy has fuelled one woman’s drive to make her suburban real estate agency the heart and soul of its community.
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Entrepreneur: Jenny Newman, Principal & Officer-In-Effective-Control
Company: Century 21 Unlimited
Business type: Real estate agency
Founded: 2006
Employees: 5
Location: Ringwood East, Melbourne
Contact details: +61 3 9259 4300
The Century 21 Unlimited Story
Jenny Newman is not your stereotypical real estate agent, grubbing for sales at any cost and driving staff like commission slaves. Instead, she has allowed her painful life experiences to imbue her work with heart and empathy. A real estate agency with soul? Well, yes … and successful too.
Running her agency, Century 21 Unlimited in Melbourne’s Ringwood East, is just part of Jenny’s hectic routine. She juggles her managerial duties with: - Looking after her autistic 10-year-old grandson Chris.
- Chairing the eastern region of Parent Support Network, a not-for-profit organisation that helps the families and carers of children with disabilities and special needs.
- Being secretary of the Victims of Crime Advocacy League.
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Key learning points:
- Relationships - In an age of internet marketing and web-based business it can be easy to forget that business is ultimately about how real people connect, relate and trust. There is no substitute for the hard work of being active in your community and knowing its people and their concerns. And you get to make friends too!
- Life problems - Everyone will face personal struggles at some time in their life. As a boss, how do you handle that? First, be generous and considerate. Second, teach your staff Jenny’s trick of emotional containment: make work a time to enjoy and be the star in your professional role. It’s all a matter of how you look at it.
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In 2001, as Jenny was developing her real estate career, her family was hit by a vile tragedy. Her grandson Chris’s 18-month-old sister, Beancia, died when she was left by her mother and her mother’s new boyfriend with her limbs tied together in a cot. Jenny became Chris’s carer.
If Jenny expected support from work, it didn’t happen. At an agency she worked for around that time she was told she would not succeed in the real estate business because her added family demands would be too great. One senior staff member dismissed her, saying “You don’t have enough bitch in you”.
Jenny was incensed and frustrated at working in an environment that she describes as “an aggressive and arrogant boy’s club”. In 2006, she decided to start her own agency — an all-female business — Century 21 Unlimited.
The Challenge
To provide a caring, community-oriented real estate service that could successfully compete with the large, established, male-dominated agencies in the area.
The Solution
One of Jenny’s guiding principles in starting her agency was to build business through active involvement in the local community. She took a woman’s perspective on doing business: relationships are important; they start with people in the community not “potential clients”; and relationships don’t end with a sale and a commission cheque.
Jenny and her team have worked hard at being visible and creating rapport in the Ringwood East community. She says: “We roll up our sleeves and get involved at local school fetes making Devonshire teas, running the spinning wheel — an activity that benefits from an auctioneer’s touch — or turning sausages and burgers on the BBQ.”
The team also run their own sausage sizzle to raise funds for organisations such as a soup kitchen, sporting clubs and local schools. At 6:30am each Wednesday — a time when she would rather be asleep — Jenny attends a business networking breakfast to meet or stay in touch with local business people. “Again, it is about getting people to know and trust you before they need you.” When potential sellers meet Jenny or her staff, they are usually not encountering complete strangers.
In a typically feminine touch, Jenny attends closely to the emotional cost of buying or selling a house — one of life’s most stressful experiences. In order to provide the best possible real estate experience, she tries to ensure that clients feel as though they have been well looked after. She says, “We are going into people’s private lives and need to understand that it can be a very anxious time for vendors. We assume that people need a lot of hand-holding.”
In Jenny’s experience, it is usually women who hold the purse strings when it comes to buying and selling houses. She says that women tend to feel more comfortable, better understood and more inclined to trust when they are dealing with other women. “Most agents just go in, put up a sign and organise the advertising.”
Jenny’s competitive edge is being known for her community work, for her caring approach to clients and for her tough negotiating skills. She says: “This is my livelihood and I’m going to get top dollar when I sell a house. But I don’t need to be rude or arrogant in the process.”
Jenny loves running her business and says that it has saved her sanity during the difficult years of caring for Chris. Her own experience with cantankerous employers has shaped how she deals with staff members’ personal problems.
She makes it clear that she assumes staff members have private lives with varying demands outside of their working life. But her view is that work should be a sanctuary where they can leave home cares aside and play their role with professional pride. She tells staff: “When you put on your gold work jacket, you are a performer in a costume, here to do a job to the best of your ability.”
The Result
Business was slow in the first few years and cashflow was an irregular trickle. By 2008, the business averaged four listings a month and three or four appraisals a week. But as real estate sales collapsed with the world economic recession, Jenny’s business boomed. She says: “Business is walking through the door. Listings have increased to 15 per month and appraisals to four or five a day, nearly all from referrals.” It is all about the business of building relationships.
Jenny and her four children have looked after Chris for eight years with the help of a one-on-one carer and the special school he attends. Because he does not speak at all, they communicate using sign language and visual cues such as photographs. Chris has learned to go shopping, cook a meal and unpack the dishwasher.
In 2009, Jenny was named Maroondah Citizen of the Year at the council’s Australia Day awards in recognition of her community work.