2016: A Year in Review

It’s officially that time when we reflect on 2016..and what a year it was! I’m so incredibly proud of our team. Here’s just a sampling of some BREL team highlights from 2016:

• We successfully re-homed more than 250 families this year…a 45% increase over 2015. We helped:
  • 110 Buyers and Sellers
  • 141 Renters and Landlords
  • We sold over $85 million of real estate – woohoo!

To celebrate, we sponsored 110 months of kennels at the Toronto Humane Society to temporarily re-home homeless cats and dogs.

We nearly doubled the size of the BREL team by welcoming:

• Giulia – With a real estate career spanning more than 10 years, Giulia joined our team in March. We’re not sure she’s had a day off yet.
• Tyson  – Tyson joined our team from Cimmerman Homelife in June. As a long-time Junction resident, he’s been leading the charge with our landlords and helping many of our first-time Buyers.
• Kiel – Kiel joined our staging team during the busy fall market and we haven’t scared him off yet! With a background in interior design, Kiel isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty and doing what needs to be done.
• Zoe – our Marketing Director. Yes, it was time to add true senior-level marketing talent to our team. She’s only been with us a few months and has already had a big impact. Watch for some exciting stuff to launch in the next few months.

Of course, the rest of the BREL team kicked ass in 2016 too:

• Kristin, our Rockstar Agent who will be celebrating 3 years as a BREL next month, took on some listing challenges this year that the rest of us were way too afraid to take on…and she killed it. I predict she’ll own the east-end soon.
• Matt, who’s been with us for 2 years, continues his quest to make Eglinton West the next hot spot. He had some great listings in his own neighbourhood of Cedarvale-Humewood and continues to focus on our mixed-commercial and non-resident clients.
• Dena, our Rental Guru, likely broke all records across Toronto by helping almost 100 tenants find new homes, in the craziest rental market I can ever remember. She welcomed all those bidding wars like a champ.
• Zun, our amazing Marketing Coordinator and Assistant kept us all in line. Mad respect.
• Lianne, our Stager and Photographer had another crazy year. After starting our staging division in 2015, she managed to double our warehouse space, add Kiel to the team, partner with new contract help (many of you have met Antonio and Jim) and grew our staging inventory three-fold. Truly outstanding work.

Not to be outdone by our team, Brendan and I have been hard at work too:

• We’ve revamped our roles to give us greater focus on what we do best. Brendan is now focused on helping our Sellers and luxury Buyers, while I’ve stepped out of the client-facing role temporarily, to focus on managing the team and the website.
• We bought a vacation house in Prince Edward County that we’re very excited about [Related: OMG We Bought a House in Prince Edward County]
• Brendan received his Certified International Property Specialist and Master Negotiation Expert designations.

Some other highlights:

• We surpassed 1 million website visitors in June and should be surpassing the 1.5 million visitor mark this week. Thank you, readers!
• We got some much-appreciated love from the media too. We appeared in: The Globe & Mail, the Toronto Star, the Boston Globe, Moneysense, Ming Pao, Toronto Life, Metro News, Yahoo Canada and Brendan even had an on-air interview with the CBC.
• I guested on some of the top real estate podcasts (for realtors): Super Agents Live, Top Agents Podcast and Marketing Genius
• Brendan and/or I spoke at conferences in Chicago, Boston and Arizona.

We work hard. Really hard. But we couldn’t do it without the love and support of our families and friends (who don’t see us as much as they’d like), our clients (who trust us to be part of their real estate story); our financial and legal partners (who make our clients’ lives easier); and our real estate colleagues who push us to be better.

But…you ain’t seen nothing yet. 2017: we’re ready for you.