So you want to be in real estate. Countless entrepreneurs have ventured — and many have succeeded — as part-time or full-time brokers or even as real estate developers. Oftentimes, real estate can be lucrative; many of the country’s top billionaires have built their fortunes from real estate. It’s no wonder then that one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “How do I succeed in Philippine real estate?” or “What is the secret to being a real estate broker or salesperson?”
Recently, I had the good fortune of speaking with one of the people best suited to answer these questions on the RJ Ledesma Podcast: Anthony “Tonton” Leuterio — or Boss Ton as I like to call him — the founder of Filipino Homes, a leading real estate sales and marketing group here in the country. His real estate network is so successful, it has made him the top taxpayer in Cebu, where the company is based. And his success has also catapulted the company into markets across the region and the world.
I interviewed Boss Ton at the National Real Estate Convention of Filipino Homes, a free event for the company’s network of real estate brokers. To give you some idea of the scale of Filipino Homes, over 700 brokers and salespersons attended the event, with each broker responsible for at least P43 million in sales. At times, this number can be as high as P500 million in sales for one individual broker. Boss Ton shares that the individual sales record is around P700 million, a number he personally beat by achieving a billion pesos in sales on his own.
As my own family and my wife Vanessa are involved in the real estate industry, I found the lessons from my talk with Tonton Leuterio invaluable for entrepreneurs who want to get into the industry as brokers or even developers. At the very top of the real estate world, he has a unique perspective on how it’s all about collaboration, not competition, and how, at times, letting profit take a backseat can drive the entire industry forward.
FOCUS ON PEOPLE, FOCUS ON QUALITYThe most critical element of Filipino Homes is its people, its brokers. Filipino Homes is composed of 52 teams with a total of 123 franchises. Put another way, it has 700 brokers with multiple salespeople in each brokerage. Clearly, this is a business that runs on the ingenuity of its people.
“A lot of brokers and realty companies, they just keep on hiring,” Mr. Leuterio said, “which is wrong. You have to focus more on getting quality agents.”
To do this, he spends much of his time training brokers and creating systems that help develop the skills of these brokers through a Filipino Homes program called “Real Fire.”
“The ‘Fire’ is the first step of training,” Boss Ton explains. Through this online training program, aspiring brokers are taught the required skills, and only after passing an exam do they undergo certification.
The training doesn’t stop there. Brokers continuously train through seminars such as the National Real Estate Convention or the Asian Real Estate Summit in Bangkok.
“The beauty of [the Asian Real Estate Summit],” Boss Ton explained, “this creates more collaboration…. We bring the developers to do bonding [with them]. We also bring the agents so they can talk to each other, [share] best practices. And we develop a program for training during that event.”
CREATE VALUEOpposite the real estate brokers and agents, on the other side of the real estate industry, are the real estate developers. Together, sales teams and developers work together to create value for buyers.
Mr. Leuterio says, “Most of the developers give good products. That’s not an issue. But the question is, will you give value to the agents who become loyal to them? So the developers now create a program where they can entice the agent.”
Through industry-building efforts such as these incentives, developers and agents create a partnership to better serve customers.
“I love these developers because they’re not greedy,” Tonton continues. “And they focus more on helping the country. Because our goal now is giving value to the agents in the Philippines. Creating a system.
“Value is not only one-sided. Value has to be both.”
COLLABORATION, CONSTANT LEARNINGFor Tonton Leuterio, there is no competition with other brokers in the industry. He welcomes them to copy his business model and his operations.
“Any broker can join us, that’s not a problem and that’s our goal,” he said. “It’s not a competition. It’s a collaboration that we created.”
He continued, saying, “I’m not looking at my competition. I’m looking at myself. So the competition is within the company.”
Instead of competition, he encourages looking inward at how the company can improve. His focus instead of competition is learning.
One learning initiative that he makes his brokers go through is to take an online certificate course from Harvard. It was this very same course which he himself took during the pandemic.
“This program changed me,” he recounted. “Our company grew maybe 30, 40% after my Harvard course.”
This success has repeated itself with his brokers, in both small and large ways.
“So all of [the brokers] took the program and believe it or not now, I don’t have a headache. The company keeps on expanding, and in fact we are now growing all over the world,” he said with pride.
ADVICE FOR ENTREPRENEURSAt the end of the day, Tonton Leuterio believes that being a real estate broker is about people.
“To all the salespeople,” he says, “all you have to do is be a people-oriented business. It’s very important. If you’re with people, if people love you, then they’ll love your product. That’s the most important.”
This dedication to people takes a concrete form in the Filipino Homes brand. He explains, “We develop a brand that we’re a trusted company and we give value. And now when they see that, then they will love you.”
His second piece of advice for entrepreneurs is to never lose sight of their mission, their dream.
“You must keep on dreaming,” he said. “I saw so many big companies, they stopped growing because they stopped dreaming.”
Tonton Leuterio’s own dream and mission is a personal one:
“Beyond money, how many people can you help?” he asked. “How many families can you touch? Imagine, if a developer builds one house, you can feed 60 families. That is the after effect. And that’s the reason why real estate is so exciting because every house I sell, 60 families can be fed. How beautiful is that? No other industry can do that.”
RJ Ledesma (www.rjledesma.com) is a Hall of Fame Awardee for Best Male Host at the Aliw Awards, a multi-awarded serial entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and business mentor, podcaster, an Honorary Consul, and editor-in-chief of The Business Manual. Mr. Ledesma can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. The RJ Ledesma Podcast is available on Facebook, Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts. Are there entrepreneurs you want Mr. Ledesma to interview? Let him know at ledesma.rj@gmail.com.