Coastal player eyes growth

RANDALL REALTORS HAD GROWN STEADILY across Rhode Island from its beginnings as a home real estate office, co-owner Douglas Randall said — until his partner came along.
About 11 years ago, Randall brought in Michael Schlott and the two began to pursue growth of the firm in earnest. Five years ago, in 2009, the opportunity to buy Kinlin Grover Real Estate on Cape Cod, Mass., arose, and the duo bought it.
“It was two or three times our size; it was ‘big league,” Randall recalled. “With the recession, we spent some sleepless nights, but it turned out to be a great acquisition.”
In 2010, the company bought and added Page Taft to its suite of real estate services, he said.
Randall Realtors has five residential offices in Rhode Island’s Washington County and three in New London County, Conn. Kinlin Grover Real Estate, a sister company, has 16 offices, while Page Taft has an office in two Connecticut counties: Middlesex and New Haven.
Randall Realtors also has a commercial office in South Kingstown, while Kinlin Grover has two commercial offices in Massachusetts, one on Cape Cod and one in Plymouth. The partners also own the Pequot Commercial office in Waterford, Conn.
Open seven days a week, Randall Realtors offers residential, commercial and real estate owned services. (REOs are transactions in which a property is returned to the mortgage company after an unsuccessful foreclosure auction.)
The firm uses a proprietary “Pledge Premier Service” that surveys every client with whom they’ve helped buy or sell a property, Randall said. An outside firm does the follow up, he said.
“We’re usually [at] 98 percent” satisfaction, he said.
In 2014, Real Trends, one of the industry “bibles,” ranked Randall Realtors as the 134th-largest residential real estate brokerage in the country, said Schlott. Most recently, the family of companies made it on the 2014 Inc. Magazine 5000 list of fastest-growing, private U.S. companies, the partners said.
Schlott attributes the success to a combination of “opportunity and market growth. Above all, it’s been the quality of people working in our organization.”
In 10 years, the firm would like to double its annual revenue, said Randall.
“We’re still on a growth trajectory but you have to be careful,” he noted. “You don’t want to merge with a company that’s not compatible with your own. [We] have to be convinced agents want to be with us [and] work ethics are the same.”
Much of the company’s business is along the coast. “All our offices except for the Norwich office are coastal-related,” Randall said. “We started in that market and that was an easy market for us to handle.”
The commercial side of the business is the area in which he envisions more growth.
“We … would like to increase our commercial presence in the state,” he said. “We would like to do it through acquisition. You have to get the right people to do that: a good match.” •

Randall Realtors
OWNERS: Douglas Randall and Michael Schlott
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Real estate
LOCATION: 4009 Old Post Road, Charlestown
EMPLOYEES: 50 full-time employees, plus sales agents
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1977
ANNUAL SALES: $1.1 billion

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