Real estate professional Natalie Hortz has garnered a powerful community of women in the industry, intent on fostering a safe space for stories and connection to support burgeoning leadership careers.
While women account for about 48 per cent of Australia’s real estate industry, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, they remain significantly underrepresented in leadership roles in the sector.
“You can’t be what you can’t see,” says Hortz, “so we’re aiming to make sure those figures change”.
Hortz is leading the Australia and New Zealand sector of Leading Ladies of Real Estate, an industry-wide initiative focused on building a community that supports and inspires women in real estate to chase their potential, both personally and professionally.
“In a real estate office, you’ll often find there might only be one female sales agent,” says Hortz. “It’s for this reason one of Leading Ladies’ primary objectives is to help create pathways for women to get into sales and business leadership, to improve representation.”
“Real estate is a very competitive industry, but it’s genuinely exciting to be [at Leading Ladies events] and connect and meet each other.”
“One of our biggest successes has been that we’ve seen women come for their very first event that didn’t know each other, who are now mentors to each other, or become good friends,” says Hortz, adding many attendees develop “really long term relationships where they’re helping each other along their careers”.
Long-lasting solutions for positive change
The community and platform of Leading Ladies provides women a valuable space in real estate to empower one another along their leadership journeys.
It all started, Hortz says, in 2021, when she and a group of other women in the Ray White Group corporate teams came together to do something they hoped might increase the number of women coming through the pipeline of leadership within real estate.
As Head of Organisational Development with Ray White Group, Hortz says she is “really lucky” to work in a national role, which allows her to be in touch with all teams across the country.
Although there were other women’s events already in existence supporting women, such as on International Women’s Day, Hortz says she and the group decided there was a need for a more “permanent, or long lasting” initiative.
“There were a few of us internally that had spoken about it, and essentially we [said] we actually just need to give this a red-hot crack and pull something together,” Hortz tells Women’s Agenda.
Before joining Ray White Group, Hortz worked across communications, marketing and PR for various sectors, including public transport in the UK and Australia. With this strong background in branding and strategy, Hortz applied her knowledge towards elevating the Leading Ladies platform and community.
“I thought, ‘okay, we need to brand it. We need a logo, we need colors, we need strategy. We need a vision’,” Hortz said.
“So I took that role and designed the whole concept of the initiative, while there were other women in our team that activated at a local level within their states and started to reach out to women in the industry.”
Leading Ladies of Real Estate held their first event in Brisbane around the middle of 2021, and since then, their events have expanded in size as well as spread across to many big cities, including Townsville, Mackay, Canberra, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.
Forging your own path
A passionate and purpose-driven person, Hortz says she felt empowered to help found and grow Leading Ladies because of the support and encouragement she’s received from those she works with at Ray White Group.
“At Ray White, you’re encouraged to pursue your passions and push the boundaries internally,” Hortz says, noting that there’s not a restrictive structure around what you can or can’t do in your role at the company.
Hortz says that when she first joined Ray White, her naturally curious personality leant itself to the culture and she “saw a whole world of opportunity”.
“The role that I’m in right now, which is Head of Organisational Development, didn’t exist. It was created for me because I created a path myself,” she says. “I was taking on projects and coming up with ways that we could do things differently or initiatives that we could introduce.”
Now, Hortz drives high-performing programs at Ray White that didn’t exist before either, and says she feels grateful to have been afforded “the opportunity and the space” to bring things that she’s passionate about to life.
“I just see ways that we can support our people and do incredibly wonderful things without having to sit and wait to be asked,” says Hortz, adding that “there’s so much opportunity to make your role or your company better, and I’d always try and look for ways that I can bring that value to our company.”
“I am pretty relentless when I want to go after and get something off the ground. I want to try and collaborate as much as possible and bring people in.”
With Leading Ladies in particular, she’s found collaboration to be critical in elevating women’s careers, saying “we’re better if we’re all working on it together”.
Thanks to our partner CommBank. CommBank supports women in business and the community across all industries and sectors through its Women in Focus team. For more information head to WomeninFocus.com.au.