He landed on the cover of Fort Worth Business CEO Magazine, holding a Stetson to his chest, looking almost cowboy-like for an article sub-titled “Head West: Robbie Briggs Shakes off Lawsuits and Shakes Up Fort Worth Real Estate.” It’s a great profile of the man who led a local real estate company founded by his father into one of the top boutique brokerages in North Texas that is growing and expanding still.
China, it seems, was a lot easier to lasso than Cow Town!
He first heard of the Sotheby’s lawsuit while on the beach in Maine from one of his agents. Sotheby’s apparently considered John Zimmerman, Robbie’s star Fort Worth agent, working from his home a violation of Brigg’s franchise agreement. The two years of lawsuits were extremely stressful and expensive, he told the writers. But they are over, history, behind him and oh yes, Robbie Briggs has moved on.
An architect by training at Tulane, and of course a Marksman, he first worked for Trammell Crow but realized the limitations of an architect’s salary. As he told the writers, he had a wife (Nancy, who he met at Tulane) and a child. So he went to work for his father who had an established brokerage, Ben R. Briggs Real Estate, established in 1960. I loved Robbie’s reference to the way agents did business in those days — I mean, all agents. I, too remember what he calls the “MO” – lots of ladies and a few men who came in and waited for the phone to ring. Robbie hustled, because he was a natural marketer. He quickly sensed that being the bosses’ kid could be problematic. Robbie says his father “never gave him anything,” referring to listings.” But the agents in his father’s brokerage thought otherwise. So Robbie made an early shrewd decision: he would not sell real estate and compete with his father’s agents. Rather, he would support them, market them, be the firm’s chief “rain-maker”.
In the downturn of 1988, Robbie says he saw that few of the regular Briggs local Park Cities clients were buying much real estate. But he noticed who was: the international clients, folks from Mexico, China, Europe. He had an epiphany that he would have to connect his brokerage to the rest of the world. In 2010, he did just that by affiliating with Sotheby’s International Real Estate.
As soon as that happened, and he became the sole owner of Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty, he had $75 million worth of ranch and farm listings west of Fort Worth and began re-visiting an old thought of moving his firm west. Sotheby’s was a bit coy, he told the writers, and then we all know what happened.
You cannot cut and past from this publication’s site (sigh) so I am going to quote. Robbie Briggs hit Fort Worth with a bang:
“It’s fair to say that Brigg’s latest move in Fort Worth shocked the real estate market when three local agencies jointed (they mean joined) Briggs Feeman Sotheby’s International Realty: Brants realtors, Mira Vista realtors, and the Bloom Group.”
He goes on to say he knows the two cities are vastly different, but he also knows that outside of Texas, when a corporation looks to moving here, they look at DFW as a whole. And that, says the writers, is what Robbie Briggs is banking on.
Now if I had written this, I might have taken the rich background the writers unearthed of Robbie’s vast international experiences — his three years in China and travels — and work that into the end, wrapping everything with a bow of how vital having a world-wide perspective is in 2015 era Real Estate, how far we’ve come from agents coming into the office and waiting for the phone to ring. No matter the differences between Dallas and Fort Worth, you can woo the world better working together. Just like they did with DFW Regional Airport. This might have been a great place for a quote from Robbie on how he sees that all working together when people in China and New Zealand can be looking at homes for sale in Fort Worth right now on their iphones.
But that’s just me, my two cents. This is a great publication we will be watching closely; I met the publisher at the Briggs Freeman opening. The writers did a great job profiling one of the greats of Dallas — and now, yup, Fort Worth — Real Estate.
