Game Changing Visionary
What does it take to change the game of real estate? Simply put; a visionary. We sit down with Bill Bullock, President and CEO of Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty, to discuss his recent recognition by REAL Trends as a 2020 Game Changer and his growing legacy in the San Francisco Bay Area’s real estate arena.
Interview by: REAL Trends
This year, REAL Trends targeted the top growth brokerage firms (between 2014-2018) and picked the 13 leaders from the national networks and independents, including Bill Bullock, President and CEO of Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty, who ranked 5th on the list, having grown his San Francisco Bay Area brokerage by 190%. Today, the brokerage has 500 agents, 24 offices and over $5 billion in 2019 sales volume. It also topped the 2020 Real Trends 500 national rankings in a number of the metrics, including #25 in Sales Volume, #5 for Highest Average Sale Price, and #20 for growth in closed escrows.
The Game Changers rankings took years of collecting data through the agent, team, brokerage and website rankings, CEO groups, and consulting work, positioning REAL Trends like no other to know the inner workings of real estate brokerages. “Bullock is among a truly outstanding group of broker-leaders with impressive growth achievements,” says REAL Trends Founder and President Steve Murray.
“We sincerely believe in measuring performance over multiple years, because it’s the truest way to find out who is leading in the brokerage business,” says Murray. “This year’s group of Game Changers led their respective brands and models in growth of closed sides over a five-year period. We believe this is a mark of consistent persistence—how a leader establishes a culture of achievement and gets buy-in from the whole team and then gets it done.”
“When you have a vision that’s so strong that you know in your heart that it cannot fail, then you do everything you have to do to push that vision forward, including if you have to mortgage the farm,” says Bullock. “Recognize that there are real risks associated with growth and you have to be willing to take them, if you want to grow. Do your due diligence and seek advice, but in the end, trust your hunches—they’re almost always right. Then, feel the fear, and do it anyway!”
We sit down with Bullock and REAL Trends for his exclusive Game Changers Podcast highlighting how he grew his brokerage and the cornerstones to his success.
“When you have a vision that’s so strong that you know in your heart that it cannot fail, then you do everything you have to do to push that vision forward, including if you have to mortgage the farm”
Welcome, Bill. We’ll start from the beginning. Tell me a little bit about the brokerage and some of your growth initiatives as well.
BB: Well, we began this company almost 30 years ago with a couple of owners and five agents and one little office. And over the years, we gradually became larger, primarily in Marin County, California, the county just north of San Francisco, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. And in 2007, we affiliated with Sotheby’s International Realty and then we began a program of consolidating the Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates in the Bay Area. And we’ve now consolidated the five largest affiliates and we’re now 24 offices with 500 agents, and we’re in seven Bay Area counties.
Obviously achieving that type of growth over the past four years is incredible, and growth comes in different ways. Tell me about how you built the company. There were some roll-ins, mergers, acquisitions; and then how much of that growth is organic and has your focus changed to more organic growth over the past couple of years?
BB: I would say most of the growth has been through mergers and acquisitions, acquisitions mostly. Our organic growth was in Marin County. When we affiliated with Sotheby’s International Realty, we were 35 agents. Within a couple of years, we were over 200 agents and two billion in sales and nine offices from that very modest little start we began in 2007. That was all organic.
But since then, most of our growth has been through acquisitions. Although interestingly, a lot of our growth now is organic because some of the glitter from the bright, new shiny object is beginning to wear off a little bit and some folks are either coming back or want to join a little larger and more traditional real estate company.
You have a lot of the competition in your market. And so obviously in every entrepreneur’s life there’s kind of an aha moment and that is the moment you realized that you needed to change the way you were doing things in order to scale and grow or needed to stop your current business plan and get creative. What was that kind of turning point for you or that aha moment?
BB: Well, there were two. I would say one was in 2007 when we were invited to become a Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliate. That was a big moment for us. Had we not done that, I don’t think that we would be the company that we are today. But even then, the real aha moment for me was in 2009 when after the 2008 economic meltdown, everybody including real estate companies were heading for the hills. Everybody was terrified. I was sitting in my office one day and I said to myself, “Bullock, if you are ever going to be anything but a single-county company here, you have got to come out of this downturn better than you went in it.”
We only had one office at that time, and we went out and leased a 7,000 square foot building, the best commercial building in Marin County, which we could not afford. And I hired a Chief Operating Officer, whom we could also not afford. I bet the whole company on that decision to come out of that downturn better than we had gone into it, and it’s interesting everybody thought I was crazy then. But that was really the time that changed the company because when we came out of this downturn, the market came back in 2010. We’ve had almost 10 years now of uninterrupted expansion in the economy and in the residential real estate market. We’ve been at the forefront of that since that 2009 decision to change the way we were doing things.
A lot of brokers learned a lot of lessons through that downturn.
BB: Yes, we all did. I learned some lessons too, but I’m glad I did it. And of course, I was scared as hell about doing it, but I’m glad we did it. That was the smartest thing we could have ever done at that time.
It was a good risk. Let’s talk specifics about your growth. What did you and your leadership team do to create such growth? Obviously, you talked about acquisitions, but tell me a little bit about your recruiting, your business practices concerning those acquisitions and your culture.
BB: When I looked around the Bay Area, there were 10 Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates and most of them were... and at that time our predecessor company, Decker Bullock Sotheby’s International Realty was the largest. And then when I acquired Dreyfus Sotheby’s International Realty down on the Peninsula in Silicon Valley in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, we changed our name then to Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty, and we began to contact all of the three remaining large affiliates and have now assimilated them all.
There are a few Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates remaining that are not particularly large except for the San Francisco office. That’s a big place and it has satellites. But we just started acquiring those companies, and cultures. This is a company that’s really focused on agents and it’s a company owned by agents. The owners are still active agents in the business. The owners still sell every day. I think we’re possibly a little more focused on what agents need, why they need it, how they need it delivered and what agents are willing to do.
For example, I mean one of the most difficult things we have to do is to just get agents to log in to a platform, and so we’ve created an environment of service and education to teach agents how to use the great products and the technology that we’ve developed. I won’t call us a technology company because we’re not, but we are a service company and we support that service with some very strong technology. But our culture here is about the agent.
I mean, we’re still, and I think we’ll continue to be a traditional real estate company. We tend to operate in the high end of the business out here. And generally, we’re the high-end brokers for all the counties that we’re in. We tend to focus on the high end and we tend to focus on the agents that we have in the company.
If you could offer other brokers some advice on growing their businesses, what would it be?
BB: I think what I would say is don’t be afraid. As a manager at every level in an organization, you have to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, but then don’t let them talk you out of your vision. And they’ll try because no one likes change, especially when things are really going well. When things are going well, nobody wants to stretch.
And you’ll always have self-doubts, that little devil that sits on your shoulder and tells you something really bad is about to happen. You’ve just got to shut that chatter box down and refill your thoughts with positive outcomes, and don’t allow negativity to creep into your thinking. And yes, as a visionary, I’m talking about now, yes, you have to be prudent and, yes, you have to pay attention. But when you have a vision that is so strong that you’d know in your heart that it cannot fail, then you do everything you have to do to push that vision forward, including if you have to mortgage the farm.
Don’t be reckless, but recognize that there are real risks associated with growth and you have to be willing to take them, if you want to grow. Do your due diligence and seek advice, but in the end, trust your hunches—they’re almost always right. Then, feel the fear, and do it anyway!
If you want to stay the way you are then I think that’s okay. And I think within the next couple of years we’re going to... And I don’t particularly like this word, but this “disruption” that we’ve heard so much about in the last two or three years, my prediction is that that’s going to settle down and then we’re all just real estate companies again. And the main thing now is to just hang on again and keep doing what you’re doing. G