Meet Ilya Raykhlin
Ilya began his commercial real estate brokerage career in 2006 as an Associate with the Calgary office of Cushman & Wakefield. With a desire to expand his practice, he eventually moved on to become an Associate Broker at Target Realty, at the time the most prominent boutique industrial real estate brokerage in Calgary.
When an opportunity arose to join one of the world’s fastest-growing commercial real estate companies, Ilya accepted the invitation and moved to RE/MAX Commercial in 2011, where he continues to serve as the Team Lead of his commercial real estate brokerage group. Ilya regularly places as a top agent within his brokerage, has earned several merit awards such as the RE/MAX Platinum Club Award, the RE/MAX Chairman’s Club Team Award, and he has been inducted into the RE/MAX Hall of Fame.
Q&A With Ilya Raykhlin
What has been your biggest career win? What did you learn from it?
While not the largest property I’ve ever sold, I recently took over a big-brokerage listing that had sat on the market for two years, and got it sold in five days, above the asking price, and with multiple offers. This further confirmed for me that sometimes all it takes to sell a property is to pay the right amount of attention to it.
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What was a pivotal moment in your career? Why was it important for you?
A pivotal moment in my career was beating out the city’s most prominent industrial agent in a competing offer situation on a significant acquisition. It was still early in my career, and it gave me the confidence to know that I could compete against major players and win.
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How has the industry changed since you started?
We’ve adopted far more technology in our practices. The pandemic also gave us the same privilege enjoyed by residential agents for years prior, namely that we have now generally adopted the use of electronic signatures.
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Is there anything you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
Technically, everything I know now I wish I knew when I started. I’d have been a great agent from day one. That’s about as honestly as I could answer this question.
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Are there any tough technological challenges in the industry you are seeing? If so, what are they?
At least in Alberta, we still lack a common lockbox system that would save agents the time of having to schedule tours, and we could take our clients through vacant properties on their schedules and not those of the listing agents or leasing managers.
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What are some tactics you’ve used to establish yourself as a trusted CRE professional?
Be good at what you do. Be honest in your dealings. Be kind in how you treat people. Anything else that can be learned will only serve to improve your practice, but these are the fundamentals.
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What’s your favourite book (leisure or business)?
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What’s your super power?
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What words of wisdom do you live by?
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What’s something you wish you had done years earlier?
I’m in the process of finishing my MBA at Durham University in the UK. I’ll be 50 next year. I can hear my brain sizzling when I sit up at night working on assignments. I definitely should have challenged myself with this when I was maybe 20 years younger.
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