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Drawing on his career working in an independent agency before joining a larger network, a real estate veteran has shared his insights around both models and emphasised the importance of a personal fit.
In a recent episode of Secrets of the Top 100 Agents, head of Victoria at Belle Property and Hockingstuart, Anthony Webb, delved into the features of different agency models and revealed how agents can pick the business model right for them.
Webb brings extensive family ties to the real estate industry through his father Philip Webb who founded and created the eastern Melbourne agency, Philip Webb Real Estate, in 1972.
He recalled growing up in a “real estate household” where his father was “very proud of what he did” and was very involved with his business, sharing that the after hours phone number on Philip Webb Real Estate’s yard signs was the Webb family’s personal phone number.
After finishing high school, Webb started his real estate career at his father’s agency as a sales cadet before transitioning into property management and sales, and after a decade in the company would rise to become the company’s CEO in 2018.
While the agency under Webb managed to push through the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said that his father’s retirement at the age of 70 was what ultimately drove the decision to sell the business.
Webb stated that the actual sale of the agency was a “relatively quick and painless process”, with the business being sold to Barry Plant Manningham where most of the agency’s team, including Webb, transitioned.
After six months with the brand, Webb said that he decided “it was the right time for me to step on and move something”, and shared he was “probably a little bit burnt out”, which prompted him to take four months off before joining Belle Property and Hocking Stuart in 2023.
Looking back on his time at the helm of an independent agency, Webb highlighted the “agility” of this organisational structure as a significant benefit, allowing agencies to make decisions and implement changes quickly while not being bound to a brand guide.
He stated this lack of restrictions can be “really good” for business owners who have a clear knowledge about what they want, noting that it can allow businesses to “implement technology really quickly” and more easily change the direction of a business when responding to industry trends.
However, Webb stressed that the downfall of an independent model is that “it all comes down to you”, highlighting the extra costs around marketing and finance departments, and the difficulties around keeping up to emerging industry trends, such as AI usage, as key challenges faced by independent agencies.
He also stated that the agility of independent agencies can also result in businesses making decisions too quickly, noting that these choices do not always result in the best outcomes.
For this reason, Webb said that franchising is a “great way to go” for newer agents without business knowledge who are looking to open an agency, as a result of the support network that is not there when operating independently.
Webb commented that his current position at Belle Property and Hocking Stuart has shown him that national businesses can still be focused and “quite agile in terms of what they want to do”.
Nevertheless, Webb said that he can now “see the benefits of both systems” and emphasised that the decision “really comes down to the individual person that’s driving, or people that are driving that business forward” to “do some research in terms of what works for them”.
“If I was to go out and start a new business right now from scratch and let’s say, pick up in a whole new suburb somewhere I’ve never been before, I think having a brand to wrap around me would make those steps a lot easier,” Webb explained.
“If I was to go back to my old stomping ground, then being an independent, because I had the connections, the network and those sorts of people there would be a lot easier,” he said.
Listen to the full conversation with Anthony Webb and Juliet Helmke here.
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