Raine & Horne has revealed the last 12 months produced some of the leading real estate group’s best trading results since its founders Tom Raine, and Joseph Horne opened the doors of their iconic Elizabeth Street Sydney office in 1883.

Angus Raine, Executive Chairman, Raine & Horne, said, “Before this most recent COVID outbreak, Raine & Horne recorded the best two months of trading in our history!”

In the 2020/21 financial year, the real estate group with over 300 offices servicing every capital city and most regional growth hubs increased its collective property management portfolio with some 120,000 new managements, a record for Raine & Horne. 

Raine & Horne secured almost 17,500 listings across Australia on the sales front, which generated many billions of dollars in settled sales for the 2020/21 financial year. The listings drive was supported by Raine & Horne’s first-to-market online listing and appraisal platform Digikit that assisted the distribution of 12,200 appraisals. 

Mr Raine said, “Our first to market social media platform Amplify proved a major contributor to our sales drive with over 9,200 properties promoted by the social media marketing tool. This enabled these listings to reach a combined target group of more than 140 million, which is outstanding.” 

Consequently, Raine & Horne attracted a massive 252,000 groups through its property open homes over the last year, while the group’s award-winning website attracted 19 million unique views. 

Network growth, support and incentivisation 

Raine & Horne launched 14 new offices in the last financial year, which is a remarkable achievement during the biggest global pandemic in 100 years. 

Moreover, despite lockdowns in large swathes of Australia and ongoing restrictions, the Superbrand expects to launch another 20 offices before Christmas. 

Renowned for its commitment to training and support, the leading real estate group provided our offices with a suite of virtual training modules that resulted in 2,600 hours of online learning and development sessions, utilising the industry’s very best trainers and coaches such as Tom Panos, Josh Phegan, Caroline Bolderston and Chris Helder.

The Superbrand also launched another industry first, ProcessPlus – an end-to-end productivity workflow hub. ProcessPlus is a ground-breaking digital and cloud-based structure that provides information and tools relating to the entire sales process from prospecting to settlement. 

The hub, which supports a sales agent’s customer for life strategies, also offers reporting, sales and marketing templates, and many hours of educational videos to assist agents in winning appraisals and listings and completing a sale. 

Mr Raine said, “ProcessPlus is summed up in three words – ‘practical’, ‘pragmatic’ and ‘productive’ and will take our principals and their sales teams from great to greater by helping them to work smarter.

“ProcessPlus made our sales agents and their assistants more productive by saving them time in the office, and thus freeing them up to get to the next appraisal.”

The leading real estate group also launched its new intranet R&Home in March, and already it is averaging 60,000 logins a month. 

As part of its Internal Incentive Campaign, “Good Stuff”, the group provided over $150,000 in prizes to the leading lights of its Sales, Property Management and Administration teams. 

Giving back to the community 

In 20/21, Raine & Horne formalised its 138 years of social and corporate responsibility initiatives with the Raine & Horne Foundation launch. Already, the foundation has raised over $100,000 with its first charitable partner being not-for-profit Dignity that is focussed on empowering people to prevent, respond to, and end their homelessness. 

“Raine & Horne has collaborated with many charitable organisations for almost 140 years, and the establishment of the Foundation formalises this support and will ensure we continue to be very strategic with the causes we support,” Mr Raine said. 

“With the launch of The Raine & Horne Foundation, we’re continuing to expand our longstanding reputation for helping those in need outside of business hours.”

Looking ahead to boom times 

Since 2016, as an industry, listing volumes have diminished in most markets, according to Mr Raine. 

“However, before the current COVID outbreaks, markets across Australia were experiencing a huge boom and even better promising signs of an increase in sales volumes,” he said. 

“Moreover, national dwelling prices are up 16.1% from a year ago, which is the fastest rise since the market boom in 2004.

“It is my prediction that once we put this pandemic genie back in the bottle, we are going to see the biggest property boom in history.

“It is also important to note that large portions of our national real estate market haven’t been as impacted by the pandemic as other markets."