Posted Fri Apr 24 18:40:00 UTC 2009

Our world at Wetag orbits around luxury real estate. No, nothing about bodyguards stars and mean guys and, guess what, neither about happy people enjoying their riches. Of course they do exist, but what we normally meet are hardworking people who have a 30h days and nearly no time whatsoever for leisure and pastimes as buying or selling property. So a helping hand is very welcome indeed.

Since the year 2000 we served clients from at least 61 nations (I stopped counting at 61 because my phone kept ringing) which means enormously different cultures, languages, expectations or ways to express their desires. amongst them was a 16years old computer-whiz kid-already-turned-millionaire, as well as a nearly 90years old tycoon with a swarm of private jets (one for every day of the week I guessed, and a multiple choice for the weekend, but he said no, this is my preparation for the future since wars need airlift capacity, but this is another story..).

Our clients from all these countries have something in common: they are really happy if we manage to present them their dream home within 10 minutes. A Spanish nobleman asked for „a mansion with at least 100 rooms“. Other than to fulfill simple and perusable needs our clients seem to share an even higher degree of happiness if we coordinate within the same time frame their legal situation, their permits, their financing, tax-ideas, children’s boarding schools, new employees, horse stables, and indicating where to shop for “zimmerli” underwear after 7o clock at evening. The country gentleman from Hawaii who intended to buy a merlot production had some distinct ideas of his own, and the charming Russian three-generation-family who lacked to speak any western European language had some of their own too.

With our growing experience, my view on how to do such a business successfully changed a lot. It needed time to realize the important points for success, and it needed time too to realize the enormous differences there are on the market between the actors offering real estate services. In Switzerland, low legal hurdles offer a quick and easy entering for whoever feels attracted to „do-a-quick buck“, even more so since there is no large need for capital. Think of a leased Mercedes, sunglasses and two cellular phones. Result is that a whole array of micro and most-micro companies offers their services during the good-weather season. Anyway clients come just once - nobody buys or sells real estate as grocery, so transparency in European real estate markets is rather low. We always wondered how companies with a real low level of service kept going and going and going. While moving our company up the markets, we saw that these observations are not valid for the high-end market. As outlined above, complexity is high and there are further hurdles that keep the market far less crowded. It is small, income will be very irregular and risky, and while services have to be perfect the amount of work may vary a lot between downtime and high time.

For to stay and remain in the high-end-market, we see as decisive:

• To have a certain minimum size of the company with a latent overcapacity (to give a impeccable service under all circumstances)
• To have a very high competence of all of the collaborators
• To start with and to keep a strong capital base, for maintaining liquidity
• To be independent from financial owners or franchisers, whose interests are different from long-term high-quality service?

Such preliminaries will make the ship seaworthy. A good captain will do for a good sail then.

Posted By: Ueli F. Schnorf