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Australia’s entrepreneurial pioneers
Ray White was one of Australia’s entrepreneurial pioneers.
From the now-famous shed — which started life as a railway siding building at the end of a line — Ray’s business journey began.
He started with numerous different activities, including selling farm machinery and insurance, and holding a weekly pig auction.
He was the first in the town to understand the benefits of offering a broad range of services to the local community.
He also had an innate understanding of the auction process and its benefits.
Ray White was renowned for his community spirit. There are many stories of him assisting those in need. Ray was particularly generous if they were clients of his! Pig farmers had their butcher and grocer accounts covered by him during periodic hardships.
Legend has it that families in Crows Nest used to go to bed every night praying for their children, for mother and father — and for Mr Ray White.
Links to the community are still a big part of Ray White’s business culture today, with the family and the company major charitable benefactors across Australia.
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The second generation
Ray and Florence had two sons, Max and Alan who both became real estate agents and two daughters Marjorie and Joyce.
Eldest son Max White, born in 1908 in Toowoomba, was in fact a powerfully built and fiery middle-row / back-row forward who played for the Wallabies.
He performed with great distinction on Australia’s first ever tour to South Africa when thrust into the unfamiliar loose-head prop position against the toughest scrummagers in world rugby. He was also a fighter pilot in World War II.
Ray’s second son Alan, in particular, played an important role in revitalising the business after the difficult years of the Great Depression and World War II.
The Second World War had decimated and damaged all businesses. Suddenly there was post war optimism. Businesses could now be rebuilt. Ray’s son Alan joined the business that had been severely restricted during the war years. Market leadership was wide open. Alan’s hands on drive and energy was what was needed. He was the right man in the right place.
Alan embraced Ray’s instinctual understanding of the value of property marketing. Ray White had become a stand out agency in the 1950s. By then, his brother Max had joined the business. Expansion began with the first 15 company owned offices by the late 1970s.
Much of the success of the business is down to the work of the first two generations.
Ray and Alan created the springboard. The job of the third generation was to jump on it and Brian and Paul did.
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Brian White AO
For Brian White, the most valuable property owned by the family’s real estate business is a small corrugated iron shed in Crows Nest, a small town in the Australian state of Queensland.
That is because The Shed has a special place in the history of one of the country’s most respected family businesses and real estate companies — the Ray White Group.
“The Shed is where it all began for the group, way back in 1902, when my grandfather Ray White opened the business,” said Brian White, AO.
The Chairman of Ray White and third generation of the business-owning family said recently that “I get goosebumps every time I visit The Shed.”
Ray White is today, by some margin, Australia’s biggest real estate group in terms of offices and revenues.
With many hundreds of offices spread across Australia, Ray White has become the country’s most well-known real estate brand.
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Ray White’s success in Australia has enabled the company to expand abroad, and it now has real estate agent offices in New Zealand, Indonesia, China and beyond. And it is not just the real estate business that is generating revenues these days.
Ray White has expanded into other areas, including insurance and mortgage finance. In fact, the Loan Market mortgage business has become the largest non-bank mortgage lender in Australia.
But at the heart of the group is a business where family is centre stage.
Brian says that, when discussing what attracts people to the business, the word “family” does not take long to appear.
The family business aspect of Ray White is a big part of the company’s brand. And the importance of family goes beyond just the White family.
It also is very much part of the franchised real estate agencies around Australia. Brian says a huge number of the group’s offices are themselves family businesses, with families managing their agencies for a number of generations.
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There was a big expansion in the mid-1980s once Brian, Alan’s eldest son, joined the business in 1963, and Paul, Brian’s younger brother, joined 10 years later.
And in their early years working together, they more than doubled the company’s number of real estate offices.
But the big expansion took place from the mid-1980s onward, when the two brothers made the decision to expand into the other Australian states and introduce a franchise model for their real estate agencies. The franchise system turned out to be a winning formula for Ray White, and is still important for the business today.
One of its big strengths, according to Brian, was that it enables individuals who run the agencies to become business leaders.
“Those leaders are no different to the White family,” he says.
“They are very much in charge of their own entrepreneurial destiny.”
The decision to expand into Indonesia in 1996, where Ray White now has 115+ offices, was partly prompted by Brian’s love of surfing.
“I went to surf in Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s and became hooked,” he says.
“And that’s where I got the inspiration to set up Ray White in the country.”
Brian still surfed at least once a year in Indonesia until COVID-19 hit.
He believes that balancing his business life with outside interests is an essential part of his business success.
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The fourth generation began to join Ray White in the mid-1990s, when Brian’s eldest son Sam came in and started what was to become the group’s highly successful mortgage business, Loan Market.
Brian’s other two sons, Dan and Ben, joined in the early 2000s. Dan is now Managing Director of Ray White and Ben runs his own property management business called Ailo.
Paul’s son Matt also works in the rural business.
The shareholding of the business is divided between just six family members — Brian and his three sons, and Paul and his son.
And Brian believes that having such a small group of family shareholders can have its advantages.
“Succession so far has been quite straightforward because of the small number of family members,” he says.
“How that is handled by the fourth generation is up to them, but I believe the transition will continue to be smooth.” In an effort to instil an entrepreneurial culture among the fourth generation, Brian and Paul established a rule that no family member should report to another family member.
“Each family member has equity in the areas they are responsible for,” says Brian. “This means they can drive their own business forward.”
Despite various offers having been made for the business since his father’s days, Brian expects that Ray White will stay a family business.
“Of course things move on,” he says. “But we have no intention of changing the ownership or the culture of the business.”
And that probably means the shed in Crows Nest will remain a highly valued piece of real estate for the White family for many years to come.
