“People are really scared when they’re buying a house, and I don’t care what level that is,” says Andrew Coronis, the Managing Director of Coronis, Queensland's fastest-growing, wholly owned real estate business. “It’s quite an emotional and anxious time for people because we just don’t do it on a regular basis.”

To help make the process easier, Coronis has decided to expand his business to include financial planning, mortgage broking and legal services. The aim is to create what he calls a “measurable relationship” with clients over many years as a service business rather than a transaction business. This means offering personalised property services under one roof to advise clients at every stage, from planning ahead, renting, buying their first home, growing their investment portfolio and right through to retirement.

“As a real estate agent, I’m sick of being that person who just helps facilitate a transaction for a sale or collects rent, basically that’s what we do, but there’s all these other pieces of this property puzzle,” says Coronis, who has worked in real estate since 1988 and established his firm in 2000. “People are going, ‘Thanks Mr. real estate agent, you’ve helped me sign the contract and now you’re leaving me to my own devices, what the hell do I do?’ A real estate transaction is the genesis for a lot of other ongoing work.”

The firm currently has 20 offices and about 300 staff that sells four times the industry average and manages the state’s largest rent roll. Over the past 12 months, Coronis has added about 20 staff to build financial services and planning, and law divisions to supplement the company’s sales and property management services. “We have a financial planning license through Financial Wisdom which is part of the Commonwealth Bank, an we have mortgage brokers,” says Coronis of the expansion. “At the moment we have a relationship with a law firm but that will morph into our own. Our goal is to have Coronis Law.”

He says the firm will make sure the client’s interest comes first by placing leaders at the helm of each division whose pure responsibility is for that business. “By creating that culture that you do the best for your client no matter what, even if it’s not in the best interests of another part of Coronis, it doesn’t matter,” he says. “There are people who have used our financial services section who have bought a house through other agents, and that’s great.”

The company plans to expand nationally in the near future. Coronis says he will expand into regional Queensland throughout this year, and then move into the Sydney and Melbourne markets in 2017.

“We want to offer every piece of this puzzle to people, and they can choose what think is going to help them,” he says.