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SVN CEO Recognized as Top Commercial Real Estate Leader

Kevin Maggiacomo Named as a Best CRE Boss for Promoting Diversity

Kevin Maggiacomo Best CRE BossIn case you missed the July issue of Real Estate Forumthe magazine recently announced SVN International Corp. President and CEO Kevin Maggiacomo has been named a 2016 Best CRE Boss for his efforts promoting diversity throughout the commercial real estate industry. The annual awards recognize inspirational and innovative CRE company leaders who exhibit ambition, financial prowess and people skills while also leading by example.

Chosen from over 100 highly qualified nominees, each featured leader was given a title that best corresponds with the individual’s leadership qualities, professional reputation and presence in the industry. Maggiacomo was selected as a 2016 Best CRE Boss in “The Diversifier” category for his continued dedication to improving gender and ethnic diversity in both SVN and the industry overall.

“We place a very high importance on diverse thought at SVN; it is a message we consistently communicate loud and clear,” says SVN President and CEO Kevin Maggiacomo. “Being recognized as a diversifier shows me that the industry is listening, and that a much-needed shift toward gender-balanced leadership and empowerment is underway.”

One of Maggiacomo’s main passions is spreading the message of diversity in leadership. Starting with his own company, Maggiacomo gender-balanced the SVN leadership team in 2014, has testified in front of the Massachusetts legislature on behalf of a Women on Boards bill, spoke on “Awakening the American Dream,” in his highly viewed TedX talk and most recently joined former British Prime Minster Tony Blair at the Closing the Gap conference speaking on the importance of diversifying leadership boards.

To learn more about diversity’s role in the innovative SVN platform, visit our Franchise Opportunities page.

[bctt tweet=”We place a very high importance on diverse thought at SVN; it is a message we consistently communicate loud and clear #CRE” username=”svnic”]

SVN Wins CRE Industry Award for Social Responsibility

Industry Peers Recognize SVN in NREI/IMN Awards

SVN International Corp. (SVN) recently announced it has earned a National Real Estate Investor (NREI) & Information Management Network (IMN) 2016 Commercial Real Estate Award for Social Responsibility. The inaugural awards recognize top performing organizations that exemplify the highest degree of business excellence and forward thinking in the commercial real estate industry.

The NREI/IMN 2016 Commercial Real Estate Awards are given for superiority in the areas of Innovation, Disruption, Social Responsibility and Social Media that have contributed significantly to the commercial real estate industry over the past 12 months. SVN was named as the winner in the Brokers: Social Responsibility category due to the firm’s qualitative and quantitative measures to enhance the industry’s image, give back to the community, improve society as well as promote diversity and the next generation.

Bringing Diversity to the Commercial Real Estate Industry

“This award is a testament to the importance we place on diverse thought at SVN, and more importantly, that the industry is listening,” says SVN President and CEO Kevin Maggiacomo. “In 2015 we rebranded with a goal of creating a Shared Value Network of openness, inclusiveness and innovation, which meant bringing intentionality to recruiting and empowering women, Millennials and minorities. By the end of last year, 40% of all new SVN franchises were minority or women-owned. For comparison, in 2004 98% of SVN franchise owners were male. Since then we have increased the number of women and minority owners by over 1000% percent. It’s truly been an incredible and rewarding shift.”

This year the NREI/IMN 2016 Commercial Real Estate Awards saw an unprecedented number of nominations making the final decisions no easy task. All awards are based on a system of nominations and peer selection. Winners, selected by NREI’s esteemed panel of judges, were announced at the awards dinner on June 13th in New York. By recognizing outstanding achievement in the industry, the Industry Awards hope to inspire innovation and leadership among participants, creating a meaningful annual benchmark that acknowledges and rewards excellence in the commercial real estate industry.

To learn more about joining the innovative SVN platform, visit the franchising opportunities page here.

[bctt tweet=”This award is a testament to the importance we place on diverse thought at SVN #CRE” username=”svnic”]

SVN Specialty Awards: Innovator of the Year – Al Stepan

Recognizing the SVN Difference with Specialty Awards

SVN Innovator of the Year 2015If you read my recent blog post about the SVN Annual Conference highlights, you know that the SVN Specialty Awards recognize members of the SVN community who have distinguished themselves in 2015 by making significant impacts on the commercial real estate industry and beyond. The awards – which included Team Player of the Year, Ambassador of the Year, Collaborator of the Year, Trainer of the Year, Humanitarian of the Year, Prospector of the Year, Innovator of the Year, and Firm of the Year – looked beyond production results and instead focused on culture. The winners of this year’s SVN Specialty Awards each embody traits that the SVN culture values immensely: practicing collaboration, cooperation and conscious capitalism while excelling in commercial real estate.

SVN Innovator of the Year 2015 – Al Stepan

Al Stepan - SVN Innovator of the Year 2015

When it comes to treating an SVN franchise like a business, no one is more of an innovator than Al Stepan. He has led the organization in investing in bringing in outside specialists to support recruiting, which has allowed him to scale his teams. He was also a driving force behind the consolidation of our Denver and Fort Collins offices, positioning them to be a regional powerhouse. These are just a couple of the examples of thinking big and applying best business practices to the operation of an SVN franchise. And it’s an innovation that we can all learn from.

Al Stepan is a principal of SVN | Chicago Commercial and serves as a Managing Director along with Michael Thanasouras and Scott Maesel in Chicago, IL.


The SVN blog will be featuring one SVN Specialty Award winner every week for the next few weeks. Stay up to date with SVN and CRE industry news.

SVN State of the Company: Change or Die by Kevin Maggiacomo

Kevin Maggiacomo, President & CEO of Sperry Van Ness Internationa
Kevin Maggiacomo, President & Chief Executive Officer of Sperry Van Ness International Corporation

As President and CEO of Sperry Van Ness International Corporation, my role, aside from addressing the perennially evolving needs of the organization, is to spend a good percentage of my time on strategy and “second wave growth.” Creating a real estate services platform, scaling-up new offerings like property management and auction, but also on expanding upon the disruption that our compensated cooperation model has had on the industry is where I spent a considerable amount of my time. In this post I’ll share with you why we’ve funded and embraced such an “innovation lab” at SVN, and describe why it’s an important cause.

Inspired by the Motley Fool, whose two founders I recently spent time with at the Conscious Capitalism conference, let us consider the following notion: Becoming a leading company in an industry requires the right people, and I’m not talking about at the executive level, but at every level. An appetite for change has to be in a company’s DNA.  But being an industry leader also requires a tremendous amount of imagination… imagining a different world. A world almost like the one we live in now, but more efficient.  Becoming a laggard in an industry requires a lack of imagination. And just like any industry on the planet, there are forces that will disrupt commercial real estate brokerage and we are not immune.

Change happens to industries. Just ask a newspaper publisher, or anyone who invested in that industry in recent years. We still read newspapers – in fact we read them more today than in previous generations – but we don’t read them in quite the same way. And without a bridge loan from the then richest man on the planet, even the patriarch of the publishers – The New York Times – would have filed for bankruptcy protection. Were there warnings this would happen? You bet.

Back in 1993, a man named Gordy Thompson worked for The New York Times, and his job title was “Internet Services Manager.” Rest assured that in the C-Suite at The Times, no one knew what the role included, much less understood that it was arguably the most important position at the newspaper. As the story goes, Thompson tried – and failed to deliver the following message to The Times execs: “When a 14-year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you’ve got a problem.”

Thompson was in the habit of hanging out on Internet message boards, if you remember those from back in the day. There, Thompson noticed that fans of the Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry were re-posting Barry’s columns on the 2,000 person strong Usenet so that people who couldn’t read the Herald now could. In other words, the greatest competitive threat for newspapers was the popularity of their own content.  People wanted more of it where and when they wanted – on their terms.

This same trend has occurred in the financial industry when we began facilitating our own trades online – and the list goes on. Did people stop traveling? No, they stopped paying travel agents. And you better believe there was a Gordy Thompson every time, sounding the alarm, telling the corporate executives to use a little imagination. Saying “people want what they want, when they want it, where they want it and how they want it.  And if we don’t figure out a way to give it to them, they are going to get it somewhere else.”

Innovating to develop new methods of providing Commercial Real Estate (CRE) advisory services, working towards making the opaque and antiquated CRE industry more transparent and efficient are a few of the causes which drive the SVN innovation lab’s purpose – embracing the disruptive economic forces inherent in other industries is a big focus of our leadership team. When we talk about opening up parts of SVN – our Monday Morning Sales Calls to anyone who wants to listen or the previous version of our OnlinePublisherTM (www.crelaunch.com) – we’re focusing on increasing our productivity through collaboration with the entire industry, making it more efficient in the process.  This is the Sperry Van Ness® Difference. To learn more check out our SVN Difference Video.


Kevin Maggiacomo is the President and CEO of Sperry Van Ness International Corp.

*All Sperry Van Ness® offices are independently owned and operated.