Agency President Laney Hake Austin shares lessons learned from expanding to 150 offices in 14 countries.
Everyone wants to globalize, but few talk about what it actually takes.
In my six years at The Agency, we have grown to over 150 offices in 14 countries. That growth was one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences of my career and provided me with a series of lessons that no domestic scenario could have prepared me for. Here’s what I learned.
Rewrite the playbook for each destination
When we develop our business within Japan, we operate within a common framework. Licensing, compliance, transaction structure, consumer expectations: They vary by state, but exist within a recognizable system. Internationally, that foundation will disappear.
Every market has its own regulatory environment, its own trading norms, and its own version of what a brokerage firm should be. What this means operationally is that you can’t export a system and expect it to land.
There has to be a will to rebuild. It’s not about brand, culture, or standards, it’s about the infrastructure that delivers all of that in a whole new context.
Brokerage firms that are struggling internationally often assume their products are a domestic model. it’s not. Your values are your product. Everything else needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Find a partner who knows things you could never do
The most important decision in international markets is not which city you choose or when you enter. It’s the partner you choose to work with.
In the domestic franchise model, the weakness of the operator is a problem. Internationally, weak operators risk unraveling everything they have built, with far less visibility and far fewer mechanisms for course correction.
We look for partners who understand the market in a way that outsiders can never understand. This means we’re looking for partners with existing relationships, local trust, and a true alignment in how we practice real estate.
Brands provide a platform. Partners provide context. When this equation works, it produces results that neither could have built alone.
Building infrastructure across borders
Technology, compliance, training, communication, none of them are sexy, but that’s the difference between international presence and international business.
If you operate in a dozen markets in multiple countries, the question isn’t whether your system can handle the volume. The key is being able to accommodate changes such as different languages, different legal requirements, and different ways agents access and share information.
We needed to make significant investments in our operational backbone to enable consistency at scale. Consistency, not uniformity.
Homogeneity means that all markets look the same. Consistency means that all markets reflect the same values and the same commitment to customer experience, even if the expression varies from country to country.
respect timelines
Each step of international growth will take longer than expected, including licensing, recruiting, onboarding, building local brand awareness, and gaining the trust of agents and clients with whom you didn’t previously have a relationship. Securities companies that are struggling globally are often those that entered the market with a domestic schedule in mind.
Another thing that most people underestimate is whether their own inner culture is strong enough to withstand travel. If your culture relies on proximity, face-to-face leadership, or the energy of a single office or charismatic person, it won’t scale.
To survive distance, culture must be systematic. That means codifying values, investing in training and communication infrastructure, and building leadership at every level of the organization, not just at the top.
what we learned
Global growth is more than just a growth strategy. It’s an operational commitment. Intermediaries building something authentic internationally understood from the beginning that planting the flag was not the end of the job, but the beginning.
Agents and operators who succeed in this environment are genuinely interested in markets different from their own. They are willing to adapt without abandoning what makes them good and understand that selling real estate in a new location is not the only opportunity. It’s about raising the standards of how real estate is practiced there.
That’s what building a global brokerage firm actually looks like. It is complex, demanding, and often underestimated. But for those in it, it couldn’t be more rewarding.
