This week, Rennie announced a new partnership with global boutique real estate brokerage The Agency, the latest effort by the Vancouver-based real estate services firm to expand its offerings and reach.
The partnership extends from pre-development consultation through final close. It’s similar to what Rennie offers, but on a much larger geographical scale thanks to The Agency’s 3,500 agents and 150 offices across 14 countries. Where The Agency has new projects, Rennie will get involved in those projects as well.
“The partnership is specific to working on new development projects, but we work with the entire company across all markets,” Rennie President Greg Zayadi told STOREYS in an interview this week. “What that means is, where they have new development opportunities, either through their agents or through their relationships with developers and clients, we get involved and partner with them right from the beginning.”
“Using an example in New York, a developer gave two great agents there the opportunity to pitch on $150 million in finished condos. The developer said ‘What can you guys bring to the table?’ So I flew to New York, we met with the developer — Mauricio [Umansky], myself, and the brokers — and we won the project, and now we’re going to be bringing that to market over the next month.”
Zayadi says the partnership came together organically. Rennie has been expanding to the US in recent years — they now have operations in Washington State and California — and as part of that process, he met some people with The Agency while touring buildings in LA.
“At that time, they had a group that was running their project marketing — some of the original people involved in The Agency, but I found out that group would be moving on, so I sort of sat back and waited. About a year or year-and-a-half ago, I reached out to a buddy of mine named Mark McLaughlin [the CEO of California-based brokerage Pacific Union, before it was acquired by Compass]. He introduced me to [The Agency Founder & CEO] Mauricio Umansky; we got on a call, really hit it off, and we ended up pitching on a couple projects together. We met in Dallas, we went to New York, I went down to LA a couple times, and over that time period we formalized this new development partnership.”
The Agency’s Mauricio Umansky (left) and Rennie’s Greg Zayadi (right).
Zayadi says the partnership “creates a global connection and a global network that allows us to export what we do and grow what we do” amidst challenging market conditions in British Columbia and Canada. He adds that, at a time when the real estate industry is seeing a lot of consolidation, partnerships are key to growth.
“The ability to have geographic regional presence and geographic connections, I think is going to be very beneficial and valuable for us and for the industry. Vancouver, in many ways, was a bit of a closed market. The Lower Mainland was very insulated. We were sort of our own microcosm. We didn’t really create a lot of relationships outside of Vancouver. And we didn’t see a lot of other major cities invest in Vancouver or buying in Vancouver. We have a foreign buyer ban, we have a bunch of other restrictions, but over time when some of these things change, it’ll be great to have relationships outside of Vancouver.”
And people want a relationship with Vancouver, he emphasized, whether it’s people who want to live in the city, or industry professionals that want to tap into the knowledge of its real estate industry.
“We’re very fortunate that we have an expertise in real estate, as an industry. And I mean all aspects of real estate. We had such a hyper-accelerated market for so many years, it’s almost like we have the best MBA and the best training process possible,” said Zayadi. “We’ve done just about anything and everything, so our ability to take our people and platform and processes, and export that, is very strong. It doesn’t matter the market I go to. A lot of the things that we know how to do have a ton of value to these markets and developers. I jokingly call it an ‘institutional-grade’ service.”
“It gives us a connection to these gateway cities, and it gives these cities a connection to us. Everybody knows Vancouver,” he says. “Everyone has a friend in Vancouver, they have a connection in Vancouver. One of the things that I keep talking about that people forget is, we’re one of the only cities in the world [from where] you can get to Europe in 10 hours, Asia in 10 hours, and anywhere in the US in six hours. And we’re in Canada. And we’re still one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Those are factors that you can’t change.”
Asked about how the gateway city real estate markets in the US are doing these days, Zayadi says interest rates are a big factor, and that affordability is hurting.
“Most of the cities are off of historical averages. Many are still trying to recover from pre-pandemic levels. The 2018-2019 market, they’re still not back there, whereas other markets that had a really great run in 2021-2022, similar to Vancouver, they’re off on absorption, they’re soft on pricing. You’re not seeing the same level of new development that you did before,” he says. “But some are coming back a little earlier than others.”
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