Toronto has a brand new Black woman-led real estate company, and its owner hopes to help other people of colour in the city achieve their dreams and create long-lasting wealth.
Renowned realtor Bethany King started her work in the real estate industry in 2018. Since then, she has become a top-producing professional, and built one of the best-performing teams at her previous brokerage.
She has also built a successful social media platform, with over 140K followers on TikTok and 11k on Instagram, where she creates engaging content about the housing market and systemic barriers in the real estate industry, with the goal of reinventing how agents communicate effectively with their clients.
Now, King is launching her own brokerage, King Realty Co., which is one of Toronto’s first real estate companies to be entirely led by a Black woman.
“It’s being black owned isn’t just the headline, it is history being made. And the thing is we are not trying to compete with traditional brokerages in the marketplace. We are building what comes next,” she told Now Toronto on Wednesday.
Despite Toronto being one of the most diverse cities in the world, King says the city’s real estate industry still has a long way to go in representing this diversity.
In 2021, a survey conducted by the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) revealed that while there is significant diversity in the industry, with 58 per cent of its members identifying as racialized, this diversity is not equally reflected across all communities.
Although eight per cent of the city’s population identified as Black at the time, only three per cent of the TRREB’s members were Black. Meanwhile, Black respondents were also more likely to report experiencing unfair treatment by clients, colleagues, home inspectors, and financial institutions, or having their clients face discrimination from home buyers. Additionally, 29 per cent of the women surveyed also reported being more likely to experience unfair treatment.
But King hopes that Realty King Co. will be a step towards changing this reality for other entrepreneurs, while supporting racialized homebuyers and owners in the city.
“I’ve spent so many years helping people from all ethnicities buy and sell real estate. Primarily, though I represent a lot of visible minorities, and it’s so satisfactory when you can play such a small part in a milestone in someone’s life when they buy their first home, for example,” she said.
“But now it’s also such a wonderful feeling when you can help and empower other business professionals to support themselves and build businesses where they can live their dream lives, is what we say, and truly build generational wealth and legacy.”
The realtor explains that buying real estate is one of the most effective ways for people to build long-lasting wealth, and she hopes to facilitate that for racialized people, along with younger clients.
Using a modern, technology-driven approach, King says the new brokerage will utilize technology, artificial intelligence, and cloud-based software that are often overlooked by other traditional firms.
Moreover, the realtor says that her team is prepared to find solutions and adapt to the realities faced by younger generations, who experience greater economic challenges than previous ones, which affects their ability to enter the market.
“The new generation, whether they are business owners, real estate agents or consumers, have now experienced several recessions, several economic changes,” she said.
“Sometimes a consumer is looking for an agent or a business professional, whether that’s real estate mortgages, no matter what industry, [who] can adapt to these times and [who] understands.”
In addition, King hopes that her success with launching the company will inspire young generations to chase their dreams, especially People of Colour.
“When we say that we’re building a legacy, we’re building representation for generations after us, so that other young girls and young boys can have an office that they can walk into in the future and talk to people who look like them, and who understand their journey and who understand their challenges.”
