LandReport Features Aaron Graham
This interview originally appeared in The Land Report September 2018 Newsletter.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Aaron Graham, president of National Land Realty, one of the fastest-growing land brokerage networks in the country.
ELR: Aaron, National Land Realty started out as a predominately Southeastern entity, but you folks are really growing in to your name and are quickly establishing a national footprint. You were named to Inc. magazine’s 2018 top 5,000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies, No. 1 in the land brokerage category. Tell our audience about that.
Aaron Graham: We’re excited to have been named as one of America’s fastest-growing companies in Inc. Magazine’s prestigious Inc. 5000 list for the second year in a row. Our team members, our brand, our culture and our desire for innovating have all been contributing factors to our exponential growth and success. When it comes to our brand, there really aren’t any limitations on the types of land we sell. Our national platform allows our agents to carry out our mission of matching the right buyers with the right property. Each of our land professionals are local to each of the areas they serve with the national reach and resources of our nationwide company network. Our growth has really been tremendous. We went from being in 17 states in 2017 to over 25 now, with almost 60 offices total across the country and more than 200 people in our organization. Our goal is to become the largest land brokerage in America and so far, we’re right on track. We’re already expecting to see 40% growth in revenue this year.
ELR: National Land Realty has some interesting, proprietary technologies and methodologies. One example is your Land Tour 360® video technology. Give us insight.
AG: As I started seeing more and more drone videos of properties, I kept asking myself, “Where are the property’s boundaries?” “Where does the property begin and end?” And that led us to understand that the technology that answered my questions hadn’t been fully developed yet. So, we decided to jump on the opportunity and develop an authentic virtual touring technology that would allow people to view properties without ever physically stepping foot on them. Something that would answer the property boundary line problem and also show the property with points of interest such as pictures, videos, important textual information, and more. Land Tour 360® has been tremendously well-received by the general public. We believe it’s allowing buyers to be more educated than ever before. Moving forward, the vast majority of our listings will contain a virtual tour.
Our overall goal as a company and with our technology is to be as transparent as possible with the public. We’ve seen many beneficial opportunities to develop more technology that we’ve already started working on to better the customer experience. We’re excited about what we’ve created through our GIS systems, which we’ve coined as LandBase™. The most exciting part about it is being able to display information about properties that have been sold so the visitor, whether a buyer or a seller, can educate themselves on what is happening in their local land markets.
ELR: Your company also has an annual land summit. Tell us about it.
AG: We’re really excited to host our 3rd Annual National Land Summit in Atlanta this February. The Summit is an annual gathering of our team where we unveil our latest technology updates, provide quality sessions on industry topics, and we also have a lot of fun with an awards banquet where we spend time recognizing our top achievers. This past year’s event was a huge success. It was a great pleasure to have my former football coach, Dr. Tom Osborne, as our keynote speaker there. As we move forward, the number of sponsors and overall quality of the Summit continues to improve. I believe there’s no better time to build culture than when we can get together in one place. If you’re not at the Summit, you’re missing out!