Chicago executive profile: Janice Corley, Re/Max Gold Coast

At the age of 64, she is opening workplaces in Hyde Park and Sandburg Village in the next month. She has an workplace in Houston and is trying to get satellites in Hinsdale and the North Shore.

The formidable Corley is masking a whole lot of ground. When she opened her Gold Coastline place of work a small over a 10 years ago, she experienced two product sales brokers. She’s at the moment acquired 75 individuals doing work for her there and from the one business office produced $210 million in sales final year, up 10% from 2020, and is projecting companywide profits of $300 million this 12 months.

What is Corley’s formula? She has owned and operate other workplaces in advance of this Re/Max and has gotten very good at forging interactions with prime producers, who regard her for the prolonged hours she works and readiness to solution her telephone at all several hours to settle complications. Purchaser willing to bypass a dwelling inspection? She’s acquired all set information on this sort of troubles.

“Janice is charming and also pushed. She’s a fantastic supervisor of individuals,” says Richard Druker, a handling broker at rival Baird & Warner who has labored with Corley. “The evidence of that is that brokers follow her when she opens up new workplaces, demonstrating their loyalty.” As for the plans to transfer to the suburbs, Druker provides: “She can be successful wherever.”

Corley grew up in Houston and received an undergraduate degree in banking and finance from Texas Southern College, then went to function at General Motors Acceptance Corp., the automobile lending giant. She migrated to the GMAC business office in Oakbrook Terrace, but quit when development prospects had been slow to materialize.

The dilemma was not that she is Black, she suggests. “I was a lady and managers assumed I would stop ahead of prolonged to have infants,” she claims. (Memo to people professionals: Corley went on to have two women and raise them as a solitary mother or father a person of them is now married to Possibility the Rapper.)

So she quit to get the job done in the Loop as a multifamily rental agent. She graduated to become a regional director for Coldwell Banker prior to getting a dollars-losing Re/Max place of work in Previous Town. She took out a household-fairness loan on her Lincoln Square house to invest in it for $400,000 with no even wanting at the guides.

“I had confidence that I could recruit leading salespeople to that office. Turning all around unprofitable places of work is a thing I’ve often been good at,” Corley suggests. She admits to a name for poaching talent away from other workplaces that “were weak, with lousy management and realtors prepared to transfer on.”

Her Re/Max office environment became the No. 1 franchised office in the country as calculated by product sales quantity in the time period all over 2004. Then arrived a franchise switch to Sotheby’s and even now later on the Terrific Recession of 2008 and the housing crash. With a workers swollen to 500, Corley took a $4 million give to promote out, a great deal to her relief.

“By then, I experienced a few partners and five workplaces and outside buyers, and could not make a determination devoid of using a vote in our boardroom. Nonetheless I was the rainmaker and the only one particular who genuinely knew what to do,” Corley states.

She resolved to downsize in her go to the Gold Coast, nevertheless the advancement soon revved up yet again. It ongoing as a result of COVID, however Corley observed a change in living designs. “As men and women still left their Chicago places of work, they were functioning from property more in the suburbs.” Which is when she made the decision to begin looking for workplaces in the suburbs. “It designed sense for us to be there.”

So she is now searching for smaller mom-and-pop businesses over and above Chicago to obtain.

She’s located that the quickest route to results is to discover a revenue-getting rid of business enterprise, place the right persons to do the job there and then develop quickly. She can make it appear uncomplicated.