William Raveis’ first career was as a systems analyst for Westinghouse International in New York, where he helped coordinate computer systems. When he finished his biggest project, however, he found out just how life works in a global corporation.

“When we connected domestic and international in a global corporation together, which was basically my team, everybody took credit for it but the little kid in the audience who did it,” Raveis said. “When the CEO, the chairman, and the CFO are sort of saying how great this product is, and not saying anything about us – the team that did it – I said to myself this is not the environment I want to be in.”

He looked for something he knew: his father was a “small-time contractor,” so he went into real estate. A phone and a desk later, he had started William Raveis Real Estate. Now, 35 years later, the company has 65 offices and 2,500 agents, and Raveis took that early experience at Westinghouse to heart.

“The people who work for you are basically the people who make the company happen,” he said.

WILLIAM RAVEIS
Title: CEO
Company: William Raveis Real Estate
Experience: 35 Years
Age: 63

You said you were a systems analyst for Westinghouse. What did you bring over from that computing background?

It’s our biggest strength. If you look at the company, it’s all technology. From day one, they had Texas Instruments 707s, little computer things. We got involved with that. We got involved with all the technology early. The Internet, we’ve been all over that since 1995. It’s sort of what we do. It’s a strength of the company.

How does that make everyone’s job easier?

Well, you know the whole world is online. So it’s kind of nice to have the CEO understand technology. So we built everything we’re doing around the online business. So therefore we’re more efficient, we respond faster and the business model is different than our competitors, and it goes on and on and on. We have 8 million visitors on Raveis.com right now. It’s one of the premier sites in the Northeast.

You said you’re focusing on the online business, but you’re opening more offices constantly. How do those two things work together?

Well the bricks and mortars, in past years, were very important because you put an ad in the newspaper, somebody called in or they walked through the office, you sat down and you had a conference with them. The information basically was in the bricks and mortars. Well that’s all changed. The information is online and it’s available to everybody. The purpose of the bricks and mortars is to house your customers, meaning your sales associates. But it’s the online interaction that keeps them alive.

So what’s happening is “The Shift.” Usually during the downturns, and I’ve been through three of them, the business model gets whacked. It got whacked in the ’90s a bit with the Internet coming, and the technology bubble and things started happening, but the newspapers were still an important segment of your life. In 2009, what’s happening is that because of the reduced amount of sales, you have to make some decisions on where you put your money. A lot of other companies couldn’t afford to get into the newspapers at the same ad rate that they were getting, so they pulled back. We’ve been investing in the Internet for 13 years. So we’ve paralleled over the last several years in investing in the newspapers, and pulling back a little bit, but investing more and more in technology, as the newspaper business is going away.

Have you ever been on Amazon.com? You know how they queue all the time about, ‘Did you think about reading this book? You bought this, what about this, what about that?’ Essentially what we’re doing is building an Amazon.com model for the real estate business. Very interactive, very robust … we’re trying to create a traditional brokerage online. So when you’re looking for a house with us, we may queue and say, ‘By the way, you’re looking at this house, but did you think about three towns over, another ZIP code in the same price range?’

You said you treat your agents like your customers. What do you mean by that?

One of the things I learned also going back to that experience at Westinghouse is, you’ve got to let people be who they want to be, and you’ve got to pat them on the back. This business is a very entrepreneurial business, and most of our sales associates are by definition independent contractors, and so by definition, they’re very independent. And what they want to do is build their own business; that’s the reason they got into this business.

What we try to do is help them build their business under our umbrella, and in a sense they’re our customers. We help them with a plug and play with technology. We help them with their brand. We help them build companies under our company. So what we do is we give the ability to have a broad brush approach to the industry, within a framework. We don’t restrict the entrepreneurial spirit. Our agents are our customers, because if I don’t have sales associates, I have filing cabinets.

William Raveis’ Five Favorite Golf Courses:

1.) The Royal and Ancient Golf Club, St. Andrew’s, Scotland

2.) Royal County Down, Newcastle, Northern Ireland

3.) Turnberry, Ayershire, Scotland

4.) Fisher’s Island, Connecticut

5.) Augusta National, Georgia