Real Estate One is entering its fourth generation as a family-owned business and key to the company’s sustained growth has been a willingness to educate team members during times of sudden change, says Dan Elsea, Real Estate One’s president of brokerage services.
“Our whole industry is dealing with the challenge of a changed market, but we have always grown and our top sales associates have always grown when the market changes, either up or down,” explained Elsea, whose company ranked second among large companies in the 2022 Detroit Free Press Top Workplaces competition. “This is our biggest opportunity to teach and educate our sales people.
“We had a chance to do this in 2020, when we couldn’t sell real estate for 60 days. We spent the balance of that year teaching our organization’s sales associates and loan officers how to take advantage of the sudden change. And we took off out of 2020 with a couple of our best years, so we have dusted off those manuals and we’re doing it again.”
Elsea said the learning has become a two-way process, as the leadership has learned how to best serve the needs of a team that now performs a significant amount of work away from Real Estate One’s physical office space.
“The willingness to adjust, and to adjust the physical structure of our organization for our employees, certainly shows our commitment to giving them a different way to do their jobs and that is something they appreciate,’ Elsea said.
And through all of the education and adjustment, Real Estate One reports that its community-service efforts–driven by its charitable foundation– have also been bolstered.
“This year we’ll end up raising more than a million dollars, which we’ve never done before, for a host of Michigan-based organizations,” said Stuart Elsea, president of financial services. “It brings people together from various areas of our companies, and with so many people working remotely, bringing people together is more important than ever. And our folks have just done a great job of giving back to the community, which is what it’s all about.”
Real Estate One
Industry: Real estate and affiliated services
Top leadership: Dan Elsea, president, Brokerage Services; Stuart Elsea, president, Financial Services
Home: Southfield
Employees: 2,453
Website: www.realestateone.com
