It was Michael Davoren’s ‘50 years in real estate’ milestone at the start of this month, and his love of real estate and his passion for the industry has only grown over that time.
The Davoren decades
1972 on: Twenty-one-year-old Michael Davoren began what would be a long and successful real estate career on 4th September 1972 when he went to work with his father James Patrick (Jim) Davoren at JP Davoren Real Estate in Nerang Street, Southport. This was a time, Michael says, when franchising was just beginning to crawl and most real estate businesses were independents.
“My father’s great success in the business of real estate came from the basis of forging relationships, which has stuck with me throughout my career. Most days, I’d walk with him 200 metres up the road and back to the post office and he would constantly stop to talk with people. I used to get so frustrated!”
It was during this decade that Michael joined Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ) and was also involved with the Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA) conference held on the Gold Coast, where he met many well-known Australian real estate identities, many becoming long-time friends.
In 1978, deciding it was time for a change, Michael and his brother Barney bought the Fitzroy Hotel in Nanango, moving there with their families. They ran the hotel for four years, while Michael also remained involved with real estate through property developments. Jim Davoren had retired by the close of that decade.
1982 on: Michael opened Country Life Realty in Nanango with a business partner Rod Morgan, a local developer. Franchising had taken off by the mid-1980s when Raine and Horne Queensland Franchise Director Ken Jackson approached Michael to take the role of Chief Auctioneer.
“Tony Atkinson, Raine and Horne Qld founder, made me run a mock auction, then told me I needed to become ‘cityfied’.”
Michael moved the family to Brisbane. Country Life Realty was sold to a staff member.
“In the late 80s, I wanted to be the ‘best auctioneer in Australia’ and was thinking I needed to move to Sydney. I did, after I was approached by Nationwide Australia to be Chief Auctioneer.”
Michel saw out this decade with Raine and Horne, first as Queensland Franchise Manager then Director.
1992 on: The decade began with an approach from L J Hooker’s Managing Director, Grahame Cooke, asking Michael to join the LJ Hooker Queensland team. He became an REIQ board member and served two years as president until he went to New Zealand as LJ Hooker Managing Director for two years.
In 2000, he took up the Brisbane-based position of Franchise Director Australia for LJ Hooker and had the last two years of that decade as president of REIA.
2002 on: Michael was a director of the Chicago-based International Consortium of Real Estate Associations (ICREA) until 2006 when he also became an REIQ Life Member. It was at this time Michael left LJ Hooker to develop his own business, RE Concepts Pty Ltd, and had an impressive list of clients as he delivered training, mentoring, consultancy and auction services. Notable was the development of the on-line auction concept.
“I got a call out of the blue in 2011. It was a recruitment agency. Then things moved very quickly and two gentlemen from RE/MAX headquarters in the United States visited me. By the time I got back to Brisbane from the World Cup Rugby in New Zealand, I was the Managing Director for RE/MAX Australia.”
Michael had told the RE/MAX big wigs up front that he wasn’t just interested in being an employee, that he wanted equity.
“I took over as Managing Director on the 1 November 2011 and it was only three or four months later, when I met the CEO of RE/MAX Global and various Board members at the company’s massive conference in Las Vegas, that they talked ownership, which was finalised nine months later on 1 December 2012.
2012 on: Michael moved into this fifth career decade owning the RE/MAX master franchises for Australia and New Zealand, joined by minority owners, Keith Walker and Chris Chapman.
This past decade has been a period of change and network growth. Joel Davoren joined RE/MAX Australia corporate team in 2013 with a decade of real estate sales experience behind him and was named a director in August the following year. In 2015, Keith Walker discontinued his relationship with RE/MAX to explore other ventures.
Mid 2016, RE/MAX Australia attracted senior business director and Sydneysider, Josh Davoren, to the corporate team bringing expertise honed through senior marketing roles and high-end clients. Two years on, he joined Michael, Chris Chapman and Joel Davoren as a director.
In June 2020, Michael took up the role of RE/MAX Australia Board Chairman from a position of great strength and passionate advocacy for continual evolution of the real estate industry. Joel Davoren became Managing Director, Chris Chapman retained the Finance Directorship and Josh Davoren became Director of Operations.
“The 12 months prior had been massive for RE/MAX Australia. We had the transfer of the RE/MAX New Zealand master franchise to local ownership there and the merger of Western Australia’s RE/MAX offices with RE/MAX Australia unifying RE/MAX across the nation. My three co-directors led the network to embrace the Precinct platform, a key milestone in our digital transformation, along with several sophisticated digital tools. Much of this occurred as RE/MAX Australia navigated the network through COVID-19, with Joel, Chris and Josh really steering this. In doing so, they gained the absolute respect, confidence, and admiration of the network, which eased my decision to pass RE/MAX Australia over to their management while I took on the role of Chairman.”
Observations
“Using two-way radios! I’m sure no agent from the 70s would forget that. You never knew who was going to be on the line. There was certainly no finesse to your communications.
The introduction of multiple listings, largely instigated by the Real Estate Institute in Queensland, was a real game changer. Franchising was really starting to get teeth in the late 70s – LJ Hooker, Ray White and Raine and Horne became bigger. Others came – some remain, some have gone.
Three things that most changed the real estate industry were education, technology and systems. Look at the blowout in training, and real estate training as a profession itself. We had the advent of realestate.com and other digital platforms. As real estate franchise groups became more powerful, they developed their own websites and training, and not all supported their real estate institutes. Some saw them more aligned to property management than sales.”
Succession
“What I learned is that you have to have the right people at the right time and that it can be a major threat to your business if you don’t get this right.
A perfect example of this is how Board Chairman, Phil Kirby, helped me redirect to get back on the path to business success, including with a restructure at corporate level. Then when Adrian Lane-Mullins became Chairman, he was invaluable in the restructuring of senior management of RE/MAX Australia and in our financial arm, Pivotal Financial.
I saw myself in an industry that was getting younger, even younger than I’d been when I began my career, and it was the younger people who were shaking up and shaping the industry. But they weren’t just young, they were highly educated. I recognised this to the extent that I went back to university and completed a Graduate Certificate of Business Admin, part of the MBA program. Never underestimate the importance of education, especially continuing education.
Around four years ago, I was focussing on what my business needed moving forward – the corporate team, the franchise owners and their teams. COVID and the restraints on going into ‘the office’, which for me meant staying at home in Maleny, was a great thing. It let me sit back and really see what was going on. The need for communication, responsive systems and the pace of change so the ability to be agile were critical. And relationships (my dad had it right all those years ago!)
The real turn around for RE/MAX Australia has been a leadership team comprising Chris Chapman, Josh Davoren, Joel Davoren and Pivotal Financial director Matthew Andrews, all supported by a very strong corporate team. Around the same time, we put our events in the hands of Tara Davoren’s event management company, Imagine Experiences, and they’ve become stand outs for our network and envied by those outside it.
This younger, talented group is reflected in our broker owners and, in turn, in their own real estate teams. You see this occurring in the most successful of the franchise groups.
Conclusion
Real estate has always been huge part of my life. I guess you could say I was born into it.
Real estate has never been ‘just a job’ to me, so I have been very happy to see the rise of the real estate professions (in sales, property management, business ownership and aligned services) over the past decades. Every agent must be a professional agent.
The average and below don’t usually survive and certainly never thrive. Education is the pathway to agent success: education that teaches what the consumer wants and how to deliver that. It should also provide the opportunity for greater financial return.
People ask me ‘How did I know what moves to make through those 50 years, and when was the time right to make them?’
The truth is that not all my decisions were right or made at the right time. It was a matter of learning from my own mistakes and the mistakes of others, as well as from those right decisions I made, which I’m grateful were sometimes instinctive or intuitive.
A decision made two years into my real estate life was my best! To be truly and consistently successful in business, you need to be successful in your home and personal life. I would not be talking about 50 successful years in business without the love, support and commitment of my wife, Margaret Davoren who has been with me 48 of those 50 years.
Five exciting decades, for sure! Let them keep coming!
