Shaun Minnie

CEO & Founder, Blok

I am a entrepreneur who has founded real estate businesses in South Africa and the USA.

I started my career in commercial real estate, ultimately leading the largest privately managed commercial real estate portfolio in South Africa, 300 + commercial properties.

In 1998 I launched a real estate publishing company, The Creative Group, growing it from a two-man business to employing a few hundred people and providing a broad range of marketing services to real estate agents, teams, and brokerages. Then, in 2009 within the space of six months, our revenue declined by 60% as the recession hit.

The ensuing two years were spent cutting costs, reorganizing our business, and supporting our customers (all real estate professionals) through very tough times in their own businesses. This was the most challenging period of my career but a time during which enduring relationships were forged as we invested heavily in our customers.

By the end of 2010, we emerged from the recession a trimmer and more efficient business. We managed the crisis better than our competitors and consolidated more than 50% of all real estate advertising revenue in South Africa under The Creative Group.

In 2015 my family and I decided to pursue the adventure of living and doing business in a new country, more specifically the USA. The process would take three years which allowed me to work on, and finally develop, a new process for real estate agents to sell homes in South Africa. In 2016 we launched Eazi.com (https://www.eazi.com/).

In 2018 we started our transition to the US. After much thought, I decided to sell Eazi, which had by then become the leading high-tech residential brokerage in South Africa to the premier real estate group locally. https://ventureburn.com/2018/08/eazi-com-pam-golding-deal-us-move/

On arriving in the US, I spent a year working with real estate consultants T3 Sixty (https://www.t360.com/) who helped educate me regarding the nuances of the US real estate market. To learn more, I launched a high-end real estate brokerage and a tech-based brokerage. This helped me understand the day-to-day challenges that US real estate agents face.

I then launched Blok, a real estate services company, to provide practical solutions for real estate agents, teams, and brokerages, to free them up so they can stay focused on building relationships and serving their clients.

To find out more about Blok and how we remove the daily pain points for real estate agents please visit https://www.blok.co.