Winnipeg Real Estate Board commercial division member Wes Schollenberg was recently presented the 2006 National Commercial Council Merit Award for 2006. The award was presented by Mark Thiessen, a former WREB commercial division chair who is now the chair of the Canadian Real Estate Association’s National Commercial Council, and Wes Schollenberg, who is also a former chair of the WREB’s commercial division and was chair of CREA’s 2006 Leadership Conference.
Unfortunately, current commercial division chair Martin McGarry was unable to be in Ottawa to receive this special award. However, he got the chance this week before 100 local division members attending a commercial division breakfast featuring Mayor Sam Katz to have the stylish award presented to him by WREB president Walter Boni.
The other individual appearing in the accompanying photograph is Bill Fowler of the Calgary Real Estate Board, who was in Winnipeg recently to help our local division achieve some of the successes his board has had in Calgary. There is a meeting of all commercial divisions across the country in Calgary next month which will be a great opportunity to discuss some of the exciting new commercial initiatives.
One thing not highlighted in the following CREA article, explaining some of WREB’s commercial division success, is its current bold initiative to revamp its commercial property information exchange. It is an exclusive commercial division property database with over 600 active properties for sale or lease.
The division plans to roll out of this new robust and fully-integrated commercial database later this spring. All properties are promoted on CREA’s national commercial website www.icx.ca.
The following article from the Canadian Real Estate Association explains the presentation in more detail:
NCC Merit Award
The Commercial Divisions of the Calgary Real Estate Board and the Winnipeg Real Estate Board were each presented with a 2006 National Commercial Council Merit Award at the 2006 CREA Leadership Conference on March 26.
“The award committee had difficulty this year in trying to compare the services provided in boards with large commercial divisions and councils to those with smaller groups,” said NCC Chair Mark Thiessen, who presented the awards. “It was like trying to compare an apple to an orange. So, the decision was made to give two awards this year.”
The NCC Merit Award was created by the NCC to annually recognize a commercial division or council that demonstrates outstanding service and commitment to meeting the needs of commercial members while supporting the objectives of the NCC. The NCC Merit Award was first awarded in 2004.
Calgary’s commercial division won the NCC Merit Award for boards with more than 200 commercial members. Over the past year, the division initiated a new CLS system, partnered with the city of Calgary to build a strategy for selling city-owned properties through CLS, and worked with AREA and the provincial government to create an environmental site repository, while adding 147 new members to its ranks.
The division also gained access to the Calgary Regional Partnership’s database of potential development and land parcels, giving its members unlimited access to this data to help develop potential deals.
Winnipeg’s commercial division was presented the NCC Merit Award for boards with fewer than 200 members. The division succeeded in convincing municipal council to abandon bylaw amendments that were detrimental to industrial zoning, helped build a coalition to stop additional red tape being imposed by the city, and played a role in convincing the provincial government to relax the toughest rent control laws in the country.
The division also delivered its first commercial real estate professional development session for residential REALTORS® as part of a broader plan to grow the division’s membership. WREB’s commercial division currently has 170 members.