In 2011, as South Africa was still finding its feet after the global financial crisis, the typical estate agent in the country was in their 60s. Real estate was not where ambitious graduates went; it was where people landed between careers, after a redundancy, when something else hadn’t worked out. Barriers to entry were low, credentials thin, and the prevailing culture was “an island, on your own, work it out yourself”. That’s according to Ryan Greeff, co-founder and CEO of Quay 1 International Realty, a multi-award-winning Western Cape real estate brokerage.Young people who tried real estate rarely stayed in the industry.“They’d last three to six months and then move on,” he recalls. “Not because they lacked the talent. Because there was no model that nurtured it.”Unconventional startRyan arrived in real estate by an unconventional route. Born in Cape Town, he had studied in Perth at one of Australia’s leading universities and played competitive university tennis — a sport that shaped how he works to this day. “Tennis taught me to keep showing up even on the days you don’t feel like it, and to find a way through whatever the circumstances,” he says. After graduating, he did a stint at one of Australia’s leading advertising agencies. This gave him something rare in the world of property: an instinct for brand and storytelling that would later become one of Quay 1’s defining advantages.It was after returning home to South Africa in 2011 that he first decided to try his hand at real estate.As brokers typically do not receive a basic salary, earning only commission when they close a sale, getting started in the industry required capital he didn’t have — and nerve he had to find. Despite joining one of the country’s largest real estate agencies, he’d still need to fund himself until his career kicked off. He took out a three-year loan and the arithmetic was unforgiving: he effectively had to sell a property in his very first month, or he couldn’t afford to stay in the industry at all. He sold it.Then, at just 22 and working only the small suburb of Vredehoek, he won the national award for the agency’s top broker — beating thousands of seasoned agents, many with two decades of experience and more than three times his age.He won it again the next year, and the next, before being promoted to regional manager of the City Bowl office.There was nothing wrong with our market. There was something wrong with the model serving it— Ryan Greeff, CEO of Quay 1 International RealtyIt was an extraordinary start, but what stayed with him was not the trophies. It was what he had seen abroad during his travels. In major cities such as New York, London, Sydney and Melbourne, young professional brokers weren’t the exception — they were thriving, and the market loved them for the energy, technological fluency and sophistication they brought to the profession. “I kept asking myself why it couldn’t work here,” Ryan says. “There was nothing wrong with our market. There was something wrong with the model serving it.” That was the gap. Spotting it — at the precise moment the market was ready for it — would define the next decade of his life, and chart a path the rest of the industry would spend years trying to follow.A new vision for real estateRather than chase a bigger personal commission, Ryan set out to build something greater: a brokerage engineered for the very people the industry had been failing. He saw what others in the industry had overlooked — and he had the conviction to act on it. “I could see the gap clearly: a market that was ready, and a model that was failing it,” he reflects. “But I’ve never lost sight of how much had to align for it to work — the timing, the moment, the people who showed up alongside me. I’m deeply grateful for all of it. My job was to see it, build it, and not waste the opportunity.”The vision depended on solving two problems at once.The first was attracting and keeping young talent in a business that had spent decades pushing it out. The second was harder and more subtle: convincing a sceptical market that trusting a younger, more modern broker with a substantial asset like property wasn’t a gamble, but an advantage.The model would give new brokers everything the old one withheld: world-class training, genuine strategic support, financial packages to carry them through the early months, leads for those without a network, and a flat, collaborative high-performance culture in place of the old autocratic one. A young, hungry and contemporary broker, mentored by someone who has done a thousand deals, is a formidable combination— Ryan Greeff, CEO of Quay 1 International RealtyBut it was never about youth for its own sake. From the outset, Ryan planned to pair the energy of younger brokers with the judgement of seasoned professionals.“A young, hungry and contemporary broker, mentored by someone who has done a thousand deals, is a formidable combination,” he says. “Clients would get both — the dynamic freshness and the wisdom. We never wanted to replace experience, we wanted to multiply it.”“It was, in the language of American business consultant Jim Collins’s book, Good to Great, a ‘first who, then what’ philosophy: get the right people on board first, surround them with a culture of discipline rather than control, and let the strategy and the results follow.”What it would deliver to the market was a more sophisticated kind of broker: often university-educated, fluent in technology and marketing, working to first-world standards, and with a genuinely client-centric approach. Proving the modelRyan knew he couldn’t do it alone — and he understood that the strongest companies are built on collaborative intelligence, where complementary minds reach together what neither could apart. He turned to an old friend, Marthinus Botha, a technology and operations talent who could turn a vision into systems that actually worked. Where Ryan brought brand, vision, sales and an instinct for people, Marthinus brought the engineering and operational rigour to scale it — two very different ways of thinking, compounding into one. In 2015, Ryan and Marthinus launched as a franchisee of an international brand, a relationship they operated within for five years while proving the model, with Ryan touring universities and campuses across Cape Town to sell a sceptical generation on a career the industry had long made unattractive.The model worked, emphatically. By the time Ryan and Marthinus were 30 years old, the business employed more than 100 property professionals at an average age of 32 years old. It had become synonymous with record-breaking prices, and had concluded roughly R5bn in sales in just five years. In 2020 they stepped out on their own and founded Quay 1 International Realty, with Ryan as CEO and Marthinus as COO. Independence gave them two things the franchise model couldn’t: full freedom of expression, and the ability to scale the model exactly as they envisioned.Turning proof into performanceToday Quay 1 International Realty’s turnover has surpassed R14bn, and the group, including subsidiaries, facilitates around R4bn in transactions a year, spanning the Atlantic Seaboard, City Bowl, Western Seaboard, South Peninsula, Northern suburbs and Somerset West.The group employs more than 200 people across a vertically integrated ecosystem — sales, rentals and developments through Quay 1; bond origination, investments and insurance through Jambo Home Loans; maintenance and compliance through its services arm; all underpinned by a proprietary technology stack.The average age of its employees is now 32 years old — less than half the national figure when Ryan started — yet they sit alongside a deep bench of veterans. Together, its brokers close roughly five times the deals of the average South African agent.“At 37, I’m starting to feel like one of the veterans myself,” Ryan jokes.Many of the company’s professional brokers hold degrees in law, finance, investment, business science, property and entrepreneurship. Several who joined at entry level straight out of university now run teams of their own.“My passion has always been the people,” says Ryan. “Assisting brokers thrive, creating employment, giving people a real shot — in a country I care so deeply about. If our business can play even a small role in lifting South Africa, I’ll take it.”That purpose runs throughout the organisation and is reflected in a give-back footprint spanning more than 50 community organisations, sports clubs and social projects.Through Quay 1’s Empowering the Youth series, Ryan visits schools, universities and non-governmental organisations to talk about opportunities that exist within the property industry at large, and bridge the gap between education and work, drawing on relationships with banks, law firms and developers to place students in internships and jobs — whether or not they choose a career in real estate.Recognition has followed commercial success: Best Independent Real Estate Brokerage in South Africa at the Luxury Lifestyle Awards, a place among the Top 100 brokers and developers in the world, and, most recently, Best Luxury Real Estate Consultancy in South Africa for 2026.Infrastructure underpins Quay 1’s successThe real engine driving the business’s growth, Ryan insists, is infrastructure — the unglamorous, compounding kind.An in-house marketing department, built rather than outsourced, produces cinematic photography, aerial videography and AI-powered multilingual virtual tours — to name just a few of its capabilities. This helps make Quay 1 the most-followed Western Cape brokerage on Instagram, where it reaches well over a million impressions a month, with listings pushed across up to 100 global portals into more than 120 countries. A parallel investment in automation and AI rests on a principle the company recognises: technology as an accelerator of momentum, never its source. Each piece feeds the next, a flywheel that turns a little faster every year, on the simple logic that time saved on administration is time returned to the client.Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis (left) and Ryan Greeff, CEO of Quay 1 International Realty, at a Quay 1 convention. (Quay 1 International Realty) And through its shared-value brokering programme — an offering no other local brokerage matches in South Africa — anyone transacting with Quay 1 can unlock preferential rates worth thousands of rands at every stage of the property journey.The timing has helped, too. Cape Town keeps defying the national trend, its lifestyle, infrastructure and relative value drawing semigration and international buyers, with tight inventory keeping well-marketed homes moving at strong prices. The ambition, however, doesn’t stop at the provincial border. Quay 1 has its sights set on a national footprint, and has already extended its lead-generation engine into international markets — running successful campaigns in cities including Chicago, Miami and San Francisco. “We’ve built something that travels,” Ryan says. “The model, the technology, the marketing approach — none of it is bound to one city. We’ve proven that now, and we’re only at the beginning.” To that end, Ryan adds, Quay 1 would be interested in actively engaging with the right partners in other provinces — the people and businesses who share its vision and could join hands to carry the model nationwide.Markets turn, and Ryan knows it. What he’s betting on is what he bet on at 22: that the right people, given the right model, will outperform in any climate. More than a decade into his real estate career, the national average agent age hasn’t shifted much. At Quay 1, the future looks both younger and more experienced at once. “As a team, we’ve always felt like a custodian of the vision,” Ryan says. “We set out to build a brokerage for the market of tomorrow. We’re still building it — and that’s the part that excites us all the most.”This article was sponsored by Quay 1 International Realty.