In 7½ months, Buckhead-based Ansley Atlanta Enterprises has grown fivefold in terms of employees, a rate its founder and CEO is not surprised by.
“We have great energy and it is contagious. … My philosophy is I can’t grow the company by myself. I want to continue to focus as a real estate agent and be the best I can for my clients,” Bonneau Ansley III said. “Having said that, I have the resources to hire the best of the best in every position to achieve whatever our agents need to be successful at Ansley Atlanta.”
Ansley Atlanta has two divisions: Ansley Atlanta Real Estate and Ansley Hewett Custom Homes, making it the only company in the city that has both specialties under one roof. Ansley said it was important to have them together.
“We want to be everything to our residential clients,” he said. “Having to pass them off to other builders – and there’s a lot of other good builders in Atlanta – we wanted to have everything under one roof. We want to even include helping people buy a home in secondary markets. We want to be a one-stop shop for all your residential real estate needs and are set up to do that.”
When Ansley started the business, it had “nine or 10” employees. Since then it has exploded to about 50, with about 40 on the real estate side and 11 on the custom homes one. Ansley also said his personal production as a Realtor is up 30 percent from last year.
Ansley started the company Dec. 16 after spending several years with Harry Norman, Realtors, where he was one of the company’s top agents during that time. The Ansley Team, led by Ansley with seven to eight members, sold a combined $168 million in residential real estate property in 2015, making him No. 1 in his division in Harry Norman, metro Atlanta and Georgia and one of the top agents in the nation. He said late last year was the right time to go out on his own.
“I started this company with the idea to fulfill a dream I’ve always had to own my own business,” Ansley said. “My father [Bonneau Ansley Jr.] had done it with Colony Homes and the timing was right for me to hang my own shingle.”
Ansley, whose career started in 1999, has experience both as a Realtor and in selling custom homes in Atlanta and Savannah. In January he and longtime Atlanta homebuilder Monte Hewett joined forces to create the company’s custom home division.
“We have eight current [home construction] projects averaging about $1 million per contract, over $10 million overall,” Ansley said. “We have eight to 10 planned homes are in our pipeline in the next three to four months.”
He said the early success of his company can be attributed to his employees, including Hewett, who he called “the 800-pound gorilla in the home-building industry,” and David Tufts, who founded The Condo Store, a company that specializes in condominium sales, in 1993 before selling it to Coldwell Banker six years later.
Tufts, who joined Ansley Atlanta in late April, said the real estate division has gone from 30 agents to 42 since then. He said he took the job to start “something fresh” and to work with Ansley.
Tufts, who also started the Marketing Directors LLC in 2007 and operates it as part of Ansley Atlanta, said the company’s success is due to “the power of the brand that’s been created.”
“It’s a boutique company; it’s not cookie-cutter,” he said. “We have state-of-the-art technology from every aspect. … We’ve really only hired really successful agents and it gives them the platform to be even more successful. We’ve been very selective to make sure we have a cohesive team atmosphere that works very well together.”
