One of Victoria’s largest real estate agencies, hockingstuart, has just added its fifth new business in the past 12 months after acquiring a strata management business,  Tritin Property Services, which will soon operate as hockingstuart Strata. In a year, hockingstuart has introduced finance, utility connection, recruitment and removals businesses. 

"We've been busy," said Nigel O’Neil, Managing Director and CEO of hockingstuart. "The key for the next 12 months now is to integrate those businesses effectively." The strata and finance businesses are quite large, and the firm is focusing on these as the connections business, the recruitment business and the removals business are already integrated, said O'Neil.  

The firm already manages over 22,000 properties in Victoria, so getting into the strata business was a natural progression, says O'Neil. "It was a natural next step to get into managing buildings as well as managing individual properties themselves," he said. "We work closely with Macquarie, and Macquarie tipped us into looking at Tritin. The culture the previous owner, Gabrielle Lee, has built with Tritin is very aligned with the culture we've built with hockingstuart, and she will be working with us going forward. It was actually quite an easy acquisition, it was all done within a matter of weeks." 

Lee started Tritin ten years ago. "She's done really well to build a good solid business over 10 years," said O'Neil. Tritin manages 21 buildings across Melbourne, and O'Neil said the group has already had interest out of Ballarat and Geelong. "We're looking to expand it beyond the reaches of Melbourne itself," said O'Neil. 

Recent Strata Community Australia figures reveal the number of individual dwellings under strata management has grown by a third over the past three years in Victoria, and this will continue to grow with the steady influx of new apartment developments in Melbourne. 

This spring, hockingstuart is on track to have 50 percent higher volumes of auctions than September 2014. "It's really going to test the market, that volume of auctions coming into spring," said O'Neil. "We've got the most auctioneers in Australia of any group, we've got 130 auctioneers, so we're well placed for the auction market!"