Currrent - Issue

HOT PROPERTY
In a business where trust is often the casualty, Roger Bakshi has won both trust and respect. Now the San Francisco realtor wants to strike deals in India’s real estate market 
                                                                               By Dharminder Diwan in Fremont, California
  Pad or penthouse, condo or concrete sliver, if you are looking for a roof over your head in the San Francisco Bay Area, chances are you’ll give Roger 'Rajive' Bakshi a call. It doesn’t matter whether you are the CEO of a leading IT firm or the average Joe in this outpost of free living in California, his B&W Realty has got something to suit your style and budget. Got no money to buy that superb hacienda you’ve set your heart on? Relax. Bakshi’s mortgage arm Calcoast will finance that dream. After nearly 14 years selling living space, the Allahabad-born Bakshi is wrapping up realty deals with effortless  ease. He has four offices in  the  Bay
area and business has never been better.

Bakshi’s USP is that he takes the wrinkle out of the house-buying business. He’s isn’t like most real estate brokers who won’t offer you a chair if they can’t smell money on you. Or the sweet talking realtor who’ll try to offload that grimy flat with peeling wallpaper on the first customer who walks in. "It’s my goal to help people cut through the clutter and noise in the mortgage marketplace," says the 54-year-old Bakshi. Though competitors abound, his views are always appreciated and respected in the industry. Which is perhaps why Calcoast was voted one of the largest brokerage companies in the Bay Area in a survey done by the San Francisco Journal. The reason why he received the Businessman of the Year award from the Republican Party a couple of years ago. And a National Leadership award as well.

To be sure, it wasn’t easy getting there. After migrating to the US in 1985, he climbed his way up with true Indian grit. Working by day and studying through the night, he passed out of B-Schools in Berkeley and San Francisco.

 
"Moving with successful people will make you successful in life as their ideology and thoughts rub off on you."

- Roger Bakshi -

Those were still days when Indians had to overcome prejudice from the locals. Americans thought all Indians were dirt poor and lived in mud homes. It hit a raw nerve in Bakshi. The biases he encountered made it a personal challenge to be successful. He would either be #1 or zilch. Perhaps it rankled deep within him that the Americans thought he used to live in a mud house. OK folks, he thought, now you’ll come to me looking for a home to live in.

Bakshi says he joined the financing industry because according to him there is a lot of challenge and "creativity." We’ll agree with the first, but creativity? Well, Bakshi says he enjoys talking one-on-one with his clients and counseling and teaching them about the best programmes for them and stuff they should stay away from. He feels he has achieved something when somebody’s dream of owning a house comes true.

So what’s up next? For one, Bakshi wants to venture into the US banking sector. That’s for later. Right now he wants to break out of California, thought it’s a huge and exciting a market. The Frisco realtor wants to take his in-house technology and financing experience to India so that people can buy their house with ease and without having to plunk all their life’s saving’s on the broker’s table.

Bakshi believes India is a large-though mostly unorganized-market and that perhaps his slick American way of doing business will rub off there. He wants to make India a consumer friendly market so that more people there can make their dream of owning a home come true. Indians, plagued by sleazy brokers and high interest rates, will certainly raise a toast to that.