Red & Co.

Multi-award-winning broker Jayden Vecchio has built a truly diversified brokerage to cover the full spectrum of property services

MPA: Red & Co. won the FBAA National Broker of the Year award last year. What made the difference?
Jayden Vecchio: It’s probably building out the team in the office. The business has probably matured a lot as well; we’re going to hit the five-year mark in March. I think that helps having the pipeline behind it and clients that are doing transactions regularly; with the marketing, everything’s starting to come together. In the beginning you trial things; some things work and some things don’t, and it’s been a good way of refining our offer and making it better.

MPA: What is Red & Co. and what makes it different to a traditional brokerage?
JV: We’re a property advisory business. The idea is to take some people who are buying their first home, and help them through the investment property journey. Property developers are part of that, as well as helping people to get into property development, sell their properties and rent them out. We also do development management, supporting people who want to develop properties but might not have the experience.

It works well because it’s all under the one ownership. It’s not like a brokerage business, a real estate business and a rental management business; it’s all in the one team. There are 16 of us now, and we all work together, and it really helps with the crosssells and referrals internally. The property manager sits next to me and the real estate agent sits three desks down.

MPA: Surely when someone’s buying their first property, it’s a bit of a stretch to go into property development?
JV: We have four target clients in the business … Our preferred target clients would be property investors with multiple properties who are time-poor; they’re whitecollar professionals and we’re pretty clear on who we want to target. That helps the finance business, the rental business and the sales business. 

Our next target client would be small property developers that either don’t have the internal capabilities to arrange finance or the networks for sales and rentals. We also deal with a few fund managers who buy big shopping centres and other commercial assets, and that helps the finance business.

MPA: What service brings people through your door?
JV: I’d say the finance would still be the biggest inflow, because that’s the one we’ve done the most advertising with over the years … then, interestingly, between sales and rentals, our rentals business generates more leads than our sales business does.

I thought it was a bit counter-intuitive because the broker says, ‘I want to work with a real estate agent’ … We had a case recently where a property manager wanted our rental guys to reduce the fees; they went back to him and said, ‘You could save $50 a week by refinancing your home loan – why don’t you talk to Jayden?’ That ended up being a $2m refinance.

MPA: How do you promote Red & Co.?
JV: We’ve got a really good opportunity internally. We have a couple of hundred properties under management and sales, so we’re doing a lot of internal marketing: emails, direct mail and reviews, as well as some online marketing through Facebook and the usual channels.

MPA: What are the safeguards within the business to avoid any conflicts of interest?
JV: They’re all practically separate entities; they’re all on separate CRMs … it’s like any brokerage: we’ve got the clean-desk policy, ways of safeguarding people’s information. Privacy is obviously paramount.

MPA: What are your ambitions for the brokerage over the next 12 months?
JV: I think there’s something to be said for strong organic growth. We’ve had a couple of high-growth years that have been good, but now it’s working on new systems, training and back end, to continue to grow that.

What I’ve learnt is that you really have to have that stuff right before you can grow, so it’s about focusing on the stuff internally and keeping it growing.