PHOTO: Brian White
Ray White Group has grown from one man and his shed in Australia’s backblocks to an international property powerhouse.
Nicholas Moody meets third-generation co-chairman Brian White
The heart of Australasia’s largest real estate agency sits not among the soaring steel and glimmering glass of Brisbane, Sydney, or Melbourne’s high-rise skylines, but in a humble tin shed in Crows Nest, a small Queensland town, 150km north-west of Brisbane.
“I get goose bumps every time I come to this place,” says Brian White, third-generation co-chair of Ray White Group. The reflection features in a video produced last year to document the family’s links to “The Shed” (as it is known). “Could it be the most valuable property in the whole of the White family?,” he asks.
Brian White’s grandfather, Ray White, was a young man in his 20s when he set up a trading business in Crows Nest in 1902. He started by renting the disused shed on the town’s railway siding. From this modest base he tried his hand at selling virtually anything, from farm machinery, to holding pig auctions, to insurance. Twenty years later, Ray moved his young family to Queensland’s capital, Brisbane. There he started out again at the age of 46 and built the real estate empire that has grown to more than AUD$46 billion ($35.3 billion) in unconditional sales revenues today. Yet the link back to Crows Nest is a vital one to this day, says his grandson.
“When our centenary was approaching we had to find the shed. By then of course all the railway line had been pulled up and everything had been dismantled. We put adverts in the local paper and finally found some guy [who owned it]; the sign was still there, but very faded. We put the shed back together and renovated it.”
The setting for Ray White Group today is a world away from that small Queensland town. When we meet, Brian White sits in the modern boardroom of Ray White’s Sydney headquarters, 17 floors up in the heart of downtown Sydney. The patriarch is a picture of calm as builders scuttle around the skyscrapers. Next door is Loan Market, a retail mortgage brokerage set up by Brian’s son, Sam, in 1995. Alongside the original Ray White real estate business and Loan Market, the White Family Group of companies now includes financial adviser Wealth Market, Home Now, property manager Living Here, real estate investment and advisory firm White & Partners and Concierge. Brian’s second eldest son Dan runs the Ray White Group day-to-day and has led White & Partners since 2001. Third son Ben oversees property technology firm Ailo and the Leading Property Managers Association (LPMA).
Brian’s brother, Paul, is joint chairman of Ray White and chairman of Ray White Rural, while Paul’s son, Matthew, owns the Ray White franchise in St Kilda, an important area for the company, in Melbourne.
Today Ray White has more than 13,000 people, spread throughout 1,000 offices from Australia and NZ. Its reach also extends to Indonesia, China and as far away as Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. But it wasn’t always this way.
Climbing the property ladder
Ray White’s son, Alan, had taken over his father’s fledgling business and expanded Ray White Real Estate to include 15 company-owned offices through Queensland in the post-war period.
White, now in his mid-70s, recalls one of his clearest memories was when he was about 13. His father stood up at the dinner table one night to make an announcement to his small family. One of the big rival real estate firms from New South Wales had approached Alan with an acquisition offer.
“I remember so strongly, he said: “I’ve got an announcement to make, “I’ve decided not to sell; we’ll hang on for as long as we can”. I remember those last words,” says White.
Alan stepped back from the business and handed the reins to White in his early 30s. Taking charge in the face of rising competition led to a bold vision to expand beyond Queensland’s borders. They chose to become a nationwide business in the mid-1980s using the franchise model.
“Alan created the springboard. The job of the third generation was to jump on it and take the company to an international operation,” White says in a background on Ray White’s history.
“The big question was, ‘Are we going to expand interstate?’. And eventually the decision that I took was, ‘Well, we have to give it a go’. It was a big risk, and business is about taking risks, but this was a risk that was going to be significant. We could actually have a go at going national and probably lose everything if it fails. We had a go and good things happened.”
Yet the expansion was not without significant strain. White mortgaged his own properties to fund the initiative and he became a member of what he calls “The 2am Club”.
“For about a year I’d be up at 2am walking the streets to deal with the tension and sleeplessness. It was the best time of Scooby’s life (the dog we had at the time),” he jokes.
“He was always awake with his tail wagging. He knew where we were going and he knew where the cats were to chase!”
The house that Ray built
The family has done much to try and preserve Ray White’s founding ethos of humility and ambition into the fourth generation.
“Towards the end of his life someone said to my father, ‘Oh you must be pleased by what Brian has done’. And he said, ‘Yeah he’s done a good job, but it has taken him a long time.’ His view was if good things happen, yes you should rejoice, but not for too long—get back into it. I remember it brought me down to ground very nicely.”
White is pleased all his sons started out to the family business.
“There was never any expectation that they would join the business,” he says.
White’s view is formed from personal experience and informs his strident views on succession.
“I had worked for my father and I remember what it was like. You want to make own decisions; you want to be in charge of things. You want to be able to do things without saying, ‘Hey Dad, what do you think about this?’ Because your father only has to say, ‘Well, I am not too sure about that’, and it is like a veto.”
To keep that ambition alive, White is eager to give his sons and nephew what he calls a “red hot go”—Australian slang for giving it your best effort.
“It is so important that as a parent you let your kids have a go and they [the boys] are all having red hot goes in different areas,” he says.
Ray White’s ability to be a fourth-generation family business that is still 100% owned and led, puts it in a rare company. It has informed Brian’s contrarian attitudes about ownership and succession.
“The theory goes the first generation starts the business, the second generation creates something good, the third generation stuffs it up. Could it be more realistically, first generation starts, second generation creates it and then buggers up the succession? Is it a second generation problem, not the third?”
“Parents are so keen to be equal or fair to their kids, that they give everyone a third or quarter or how many shares there are in the company. They put their hands above the table and say, ‘I’ve done the right thing’. But you have given [the next generation] a poisoned chalice,” he warns.
