
Company website
Industry: Real Estate
Company Size: 201-500 employees
Headquarters: North Melbourne, VIC
Thriving and finding new opportunities for growth when challenged by the market conditions
Greville Pabst is an expert in the Australian property market, international keynote speaker and Executive Chairman of WBP Group and Founder & CEO of Greville Pabst Property Advisory. He is a passionate advocate for the role property plays in developing personal wealth.
The property market is moving quickly across Australia, with the industry seeing some major changes in recent years. While many businesses have been challenged by the market conditions, others have thrived and found new opportunities for growth.
This has certainly been the case for Greville as well as leading the organisation through a growth strategy that has led to a national presence. Greville has seen the company pick up a range of business awards and featured on Channel Nine's The Block as one of the buyer's advocates.
The Challenge: Moving quickly in an evolving industry
'We quickly realised that we needed to adapt and change - we had to be a national group. That was particularly important for our major suppliers, the banks, that wanted to deal with firms that had scale and had a strong technology platform.'
The property valuation market has certainly come a long way since WBP first started working in this space. Then, the company only operated in Victoria and the sector was dominated by smaller firms with a local scope.
Since then, the industry has consolidated considerably, and WBP has become a national operation. Driven by a need to work with commercial clients across Australia - particularly banks - WBP grew to respond to these new opportunities.
The company branched out into complementary areas to stay ahead of the changes occurring within the broader property market and to expand upon WBP Property's background in the sector.
'We needed to think about other products that were aligned with our business. The goal was to create an end-to-end solution for our clients that involved both a B2B strategy and a B2C strategy.'
The Solution: Investing in people, investing in technology
'The challenge for small businesses is that everyone wants good people, but not everyone can afford good people.'
The Results: Building a strong, reputable organisation
'We've won a number of awards. The one I'm most proud about is winning the Telstra Victorian Business of the Year Award - I still have to pinch myself that we won that award.'