Jean de Meillac can distill his 40-plus years in real estate into three main points for young up-and-comers.
These are: Be honest. Be knowledgeable. Build relationships.
In an interview with the Sunday BG at his office last Thursday, de Meillac, who is the first lifetime achievement award winner at Trinidadrealtor.com's first annual real estate awards last Wednesday (see next page), got his start in 1971, when a friend asked him to join an agency he was starting up.
But he wasn't always interested in the business.
He spent his boyhood between Mayaro–at a coconut estate where his father was manager–and Port-of-Spain, where he lived with his grandmother during the week and attended a school run by the nuns at Holy Name Convent.
He said around nine years of age, he left that school to attend the St Bendict's Boarding School.
"After that, at 14, I was sent away to Ireland, where the Holy Ghost Fathers, the priests, suggested that I go to boarding school there. I wasn't enjoying Mt St Benedict much. I went to Ireland, initially for one year and ended up staying eight years," said de Meillac.
The CEO of the Trinidad branch of Terra Caribbean, a real estate company, said he did odd jobs around Ireland, sometimes going to England, before he went on to university to do building and survey with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, but after three years, was unsuccessful in obtaining the qualification.
He returned to T&T in 1967 and lived in San Fernando for four years, selling life insurance. In 1971, he moved to Port-of-Spain and worked with business legend, Ram Kirpalani at Key Caribbean Publications.
That same year, he got a call from friend Roger Murray to join him at a new company he was starting, Real Estate Services Ltd. Along with another associate, Percy Huggins, de Meillac worked at the company for the next 15 years.
"In 1987, my wife and I and my three boys decided to go to Florida, where her mother was. We went to a place named Boca Raton."
He sold real estate there as well, but his family's stay would be short lived.
"We spent four years there. It was good. We enjoyed it, but I didn't like being one in 230 million people. We also were not able to make as good a living as we wanted to and were using up our savings we had made here. So we decided to go back to Trinidad to see what was happening."
Returning to Trinidad, de Meillac said he met with several senior business people at the time and things looked like they would progress. However, just before he came back permanently with his family, the 1990 coup happened.
At this point, de Meillac said he was offered a job to run Radio 97.
"I started that with Peter Ames. We ran it for about ten years and then also Radio 104 as well. Then I left, saying to myself that I was going to semi retire."
To ensure that he would have some income during this period of semi retirement, de Meillac joined the staff of Terra Caribbean to do large commercial sales.
"I figured I would do a couple sales a year, make a few dollars, to cover my retirement costs. But I got more involved in the administration, then became sales manager here. After five years, the last manager, who was Chris Fojo left to go live in the States with his family. They offered me the position as a manager. I took that up and I got some shares in the company," said de Meillac.
When Lex Caribbean and the then Ernst and Young sold their interest in the company, de Meillac said he received more shares, the administrative structure was altered and he and the company's management team settled down to growing Terra's business.
Challenges and opportunities
"Real estate is a full-time job," said de Meillac and he doesn't advise that anyone take it on part-time. The job was not just about selling property, he said, but being knowledgeable about property valuation, having a sense of the proper market for a property, contracts and taking the time to build relationships.
"This is a long-term business. It's not something you get into today and get out tomorrow. You develop relationships with people. They become your customers and your clients."
He said some his best clients remain people he has been in business with for 20, 30 and 40 years.
He thought initiatives like the award show would go a long way in fostering greater professionalism in the industry. To this end, he said Terra has invested heavily in the training of its staff. The company has also become FIU (Financial Intelligence Unit) compliant and de Meillac said, while he is aware of the potential for money laundering to happen within the real estate industry, he himself has never experienced it.
He related a story to the Sunday BG, where in its early days, Terra rented a property in Maraval.
"Two men came and paid for the property in cash, two months rent in advance. Three, four days later, there was a big shoot-out in the house. What happened was they kidnapped somebody and rented the house to hold them.
"You could say they had bad money, but other than that, it's something I've not experienced," said de Meillac, who said that to purchase property through Terra, certified cheques from a bank were required, forms needed to be filled and throughout the process, there were intermediaries such as lawyers, valuators and the like.
He welcomed the Minister in the Ministry of Legal Affairs, Stuart Young's intervention and his promise at the awards ceremony to push for legislation governing the industry, saying that while greater regulation was needed, he hoped that there would be more than talk this time.
De Meillac also hoped that the awards would lead to a change in general perceptions of real estate agents.
"A bad misconception is that real estate agents push the prices of property up. We produce prices by comparison to other things we know have sold," he said.
He also said, for the most part, T&T's real estate market has been a "seller's market", with sellers setting the highest prices they can, regardless of the advice of agents.
With the drop in oil prices, however, de Meillac sees a shift to a more buyer-friendly market, with some lowering of prices. He said the rental market has softened to the point where prices are at the level they were ten years ago.
"What has happened in the immediate term is that a lot of expats that used to be here and not just for BP and BG, but all the connected service companies, have gone back.
"Where they would have been renting houses at $4,500 US, those homes are now vacant. People are now taking less."
He also thought people may be less inclined to buy property, if they thought they were likely to earn lower rental incomes from them.
Increasing mortgage rates may also represent an opportunity and a threat as while money may become more expensive to borrow to buy property, it has the effect of depressing prices as well.
"But it will become more of a buyer's market because people will want to sell, but won't get the prices they want."
The Terra CEO doesn't think house prices will decrease to 1985-1987 levels though.
The period represents one of the most severe recessions in the country's history, where oil prices decreased as well and predicted that property prices would rebound.
"When I started in real estate, a house in Woodbrook was $35,000. Now it is $3 million. Over that time, the value went up and down, but the general trend has always been upwards.
A family thing
De Meillac hopes his son Jean Paul will continue after him in the business. He said he shares a close bond with him, and his two other sons, one of whom is involved in real estate in London and has worked with Harrod's real estate division, the other, running his own business in Colorado.
His wife, Linda, was also involved in real estate for many years, before going into interior decoration.