Hugo Alexander Property Group - Most Innovative Woman of the Year

Company: Hugo Alexander Property Group, Brisbane, QLD Australia
Entry Submitted By: The Audacious Agency, Gold Coast, Australia
Company Description: Hugo Alexander Property Group is an industry-leading Brisbane property management, sales and buyers’ agency. We help our clients maximise rental income and property value, improve the performance of investment properties, sell properties for maximum profit and source investment properties to grow wealth. Our clients include Brisbane, interstate and international investors.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Woman of the Year - Industry

Nomination Title: REBECCA FUCHS: INNOVATING IN REAL ESTATE

Over the past 17 years, Rebecca has been based out of Brisbane, Bangkok, Singapore, London, New York and San Francisco. She holds an Executive Master degree, runs her own coaching and consulting business TomorrowIsNow, and has held leadership roles with Accenture, McKinsey projects, and in house. She has an impressive success record of achieving transformational change for her clients. She has coached C-Level executives and consulted FTSE 100 companies, such as Barclays, British Telecom, Unilever, Standard Chartered Bank, Royal Dutch Shell, Prudential and Vodafone and has collaborated with her professional network from Google, Facebook, and Netflix on achieving transformational change and exponential growth for people and businesses.

At Hugo Alexander Property Group, Rebecca works hand-in-hand with her partner, the principal, to keep innovating and excelling at everything the team does for their clients. She designs results-focused client experiences, innovative services and products, expanding their digital footprint, and streamlines processes and systems to continuously serve clients better. Her specialty is leveraging human-centred design thinking and innovation methodologies to implement outstanding client experiences and results, and facilitate business’ sustainable growth. Rebecca has transformed the agency from outside-in and inside-out in the past year, both with behind the scenes and client-visible innovations.

At Hugo Alexander Property Group, Rebecca’s priorities and goals for 2020/21 were to revamp the business to be more digital, values-aligned, and client-centric to gear up for growth with a unique value proposition. She innovated by creating value-added services and online products, overhauling brand messaging and marketing, updating the website, and integrating innovations into processes, systems, and performance measures, and coaching the team. She elevated the agency’s profile nationally and internationally by focusing on client-centric marketing and PR, attracting national and international property investment and seller clients to Brisbane.

A game-changing innovation was the introduction of the 10-year strategic Maintenance and Growth (M&G) Plan as the solution for investment property clients to receive strategic advice and online portal access to up-to-date, tailored information on protecting their property value, increasing rental income and maximising profits through saving tens of thousands in tax depreciation and increasing capital gains. This is a 180-degree change from the industry standard’s services, moving from reactive to proactive and strategic.

Rebecca’s integral in digitalising marketing for omni-channel campaigns to attract more buyers throughout Australia for their sellers. Motivated by the challenges of COVID and the increasing popularity of video, she developed high-end videos in the style of short films for $2 Million+ properties. With many buyers outside of Brisbane unable to visit the properties in person, these videos tapped into storytelling elements, emotionally capturing buyers to pay more - a real first for the Australian real estate industry, which has secured the agency multiple record sales.

Through interviews with 100 property investors about their wants and needs, virtual focus groups, online research, and insights from industry coaches, Rebecca uncovered what was most failing investors in property management was a lack of robust planning on how to strategically manage investments. The M&G Plan moves property owners from reactive to proactive, looking at all aspects of the property when it comes to increasing rental value and property value - from carpets, kitchen, bathrooms, floor, walls, and evolving market trends and expectations - anything that would impede the value of the property. Since implementing it, Hugo Alexander Property Group has saved their first five clients over $1.175M over 40 years. For new clients, they engaged their tax depreciation referral partner, saving five of their clients $44,388 in the first year alone.

As a result, investor clients’ properties are always being meticulously maintained with the modern features tenants look for. With high end online marketing materials of the floor plan, property description and photography (often with virtual furniture), clients' properties receive more tenant applicants willing to pay above market price. The attention to detail sees 0 days on the market vacancy (101/104 properties) for a steady income stream, 20 to 70 qualified tenant applications per property to choose from, and 5-20% higher average weekly rent. This equates to tens of thousands of dollars of extra income and savings for clients annually.

For seller clients, the omni-channel marketing has helped achieve multiple record sales, 100s of thousands above reserve prices.

Rebecca's support document is a testament to her commitment to consistently and constantly seeking ways to innovate. The work she has done with Hugo Alexander Property Group over the past 12 months has transformed their internal systems and processes, and had extraordinaryresults for clients and the business.

The document showcases how she's applied design thinking to every aspect of this real estate agency, making them a stand out in the Brisbane marketplace (repeated record sales, award wins and medai attention are proof they are making an impact).

The case studies and examples of Rebecca's innovative approach to marketing and client-centricity shows how effective her work has been over the past 12 months. The document has stats and substantiated proof that her approach is effective and innovative.