- “We embrace new companies that are trying to disrupt the industry.”
- “If you are not growing, you're dying and if you are not moving forward, you are falling backwards.”
- “We pay for featured listings [on the portals] because it is our fiduciary duty to the home seller.”
- During the recession, @properties doubled down. When the market started to turn around in 2012, "We looked up and had 10, 11 offices, 1,300 brokers and we were at the beginning of a recovery.”
Thad Wong
From $40 million to $7 billion, the co-founder of @properties, Thad Wong, explains how he and his partner grew their Chicagoland brokerage.
@properties is the largest independently owned residential real estate brokerage firm in Illinois and one of the 12 largest brokerage firms in the U.S. by sales volume.
Wong began selling real estate in the mid 1990s and quickly established himself as one of the top-selling brokers in the city of Chicago. During the early years of his career, he earned four consecutive Golden Eagle Awards from the Chicago Association of Realtors as the top-producing broker among the organization’s 10,000+ members.
In 2000 Wong and business partner Michael Golden established @properties, and in 15 years have grown the company from $40 million in sales to nearly $7 billion in annual sales. Today, @properties has 20 offices in the city of Chicago, surrounding suburbs, southwest Michigan and southeast Wisconsin. The firm has divisions for residential and commercial brokerage, development marketing, relocation, property management and bank-advisory services.
