Spear Realty is carving out a space in greater Toronto’s commercial real estate ecosystem as a place that invests in its younger agents.
Nicholas Stryland, chief operating officer and partner at Spear Realty, is leading what the firm calls Spear U, an in-house education seminar the brokerage holds every couple of weeks. Stryland, an industry veteran whose career began in 1996 as a Cushman & Wakefield broker, also worked at major companies including Colliers, Orlando Corp., Dream Industrial REIT, JLL Canada and Nicola Real Estate.
“We started off very simply by looking at standard offer-to-lease forms, but we created a landlord version — like when you’re representing a landlord or a listing — and went through it clause by clause, explained why they’re there, what they mean and what the impacts of those clauses are, because understanding why certain clauses exist, and how to negotiate with them, is paramount,” Stryland told CoStar News. He added the next session will focus on offer-to-lease forms from the tenant’s perspective.
Stryland said future Spear U sessions are already planned and that some will include guest speakers.
Mentorship and deep-dive onboarding programs exist in the industry, but typically at larger real estate services firm. For instance, JLL University trains new hires through an intensive 13-week program to inculcate everything from industry knowledge to the finer points of networking to “practical skills for career success through mentorship,” and even offers technology-specific training.
Investing in education such as this can pay off with better-trained brokers who have the knowledge base to succeed while creating camaraderie, brokerages have said.
As for Spear Realty, it was founded in September 2021 by Diana Hoang, an industry veteran in her own right. Spear Realty has grown rapidly, owing to what Stryland described as its “boutique and bespoke” service ethos. He said that's why he joined the company.
Upon Spear Realty’s launch, Spear CEO and broker of record Hoang built the brokerage’s veteran leaders in a way she said sparked growth and opportunities for them to mentor young agents. She told CoStar News it’s her way of “paying it forward and preparing the next generation, because while teaching structure and skillset are important, being ethical is paramount, and there’s no professionalism without ethics.”
“We’ve found hungry, young agents, even if they’re from outside the commercial space but want to learn, are the most receptive to knowledge transfer," she said. "We want them to become better than we are.”
That’s the underpinning, she added, of the aligned values upon which Spear Realty, now in its fifth year, is built.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about the clients and having the right people for the right roles those clients need — that’s how we believe service excellence is achieved,” she said. “Our solutions aren’t uniform because our team isn’t uniform; what we offer is multifactorial.
"Given the complexities of today’s market, clients need that approach more than ever. And if they need it today, they’ll need it tomorrow, and we’re ensuring our industry can do that.”