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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
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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.
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"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.
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