How Chestnut Park Has Adapted Through COVID-19

COVID-19 created exceptional challenges for our friends, families, communities and businesses. The Chestnut Park team came together to mitigate these challenges for our agents and staff to continue to best serve our clients.

 

Office Changes

We felt it was important to equip our sales representatives with up to date information as it was made available by the city. Twice weekly, our management team held online virtual Town Hall meetings for all of our agents across Ontario in order to maintain streamlined communication of changes in the real estate industry, government guidelines, and addressing concerns in an effective and timely manner. We also held 3 meetings weekly with our agents to discuss in detail their challenges and brainstormed solutions to better support their clients, communicated new information and ways to stay connected and provide their clients with up to date information.

 

 

Many members of our administrative team seamlessly transitioned with the changes in the market. Our administrative and management team, though virtual, were available to our agents and clients at all times, in order to guide them through these unprecedented times.

 

Our offices remained open to uphold our quality services and provide additional resources for agents as everything transitioned online while maintaining safe office conditions for our staff and clients. Our marketing team created a resource hub for agents to learn additional online methods, as well as our management team coordinating and hosting several webinars to support their needs. On Friday, May 22nd, we hosted the Real Estate Reset Webinar in collaboration with Peerage Capital to discuss the current market with a panel of real estate experts.

 

 

In addition to putting on webinars, we also sourced and made available an extremely large database of webinars, on COVID related topics, moving business virtually, new tools, state of the economy; to equip our agents with the information and tools to manage the ever-changing real estate industry.

 

With strict guidelines enforced in regards to in-person showings, we resourced and implemented and also partnered with numerous technological platforms to equip our agents with the tools to efficiently and safely market our clients’ listings or sell to our clients including MoveSnap, ImageMaker360, Hanley Mortgage Group, Outline Financial, and Property Pandas. 

 

When it was safe to show properties, we implemented and continue to have strict protocols and procedures that our agents follow to ensure our clients and the community remain safe. We sourced PPE equipment and created PPE showing kits that were distributed to all our offices and agents to be used at all showings to ensure our agents, clients and community were safe when viewing our properties.

 

 

At Chestnut Park, we have reconstructed all our offices through Southern Ontario with protection screens at reception and high traffic areas, equipped the offices with hand sanitizers and implemented strict protocols to ensure that we meet the important safety protocols that will keep our agents, staff, clients and community safe.

 

Community Outreach

COVID-19 has posed many challenges to the healthcare community, and we pursued many charitable opportunities to give back to the frontline workers who have spent their days dedicated to ensuring everyone’s safety throughout the pandemic. We were able to donate 1100 masks to Humber River hospital, as well as financial donations to St. Joseph’s Hospital Give, Share and Care Campaign, Hospice Prince Edward County Virtual Hike, South Muskoka Hospital Foundation and Feel Good Flowers TO (with our floral display at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre).

 

 

At the time of writing this post, we also have surpassed our campaign goal in support of the South Muskoka Hospital Foundation, where our agents, staff, and community were able to raise over $15,000 in conjunction with matched donations from Chestnut Park and Peerage Capital.

 

 

Our campaign ends July 15th, so if you would like to donate, you can visit https://www.healthmuskoka.ca/chestnutpark/. Every donation will be matched by both Chestnut Park and Peerage Capital and you will receive access to the virtual fitness class that was hosted by Tri Lakes Training on May 28th.

 

Our agents individually found ways to support their local communities and we compiled those efforts and shared them on our blog. Our Picton agents collected and contributed to their local food bank. 

 

Invest In Style

We also created a promotional campaign to support many of the local businesses that have contributed to our Invest In Style magazine to highlight how their efforts have changed during the pandemic. We will also continue to partner with many small local businesses in all our trading areas to promote their services and products in our Invest in Style magazine.

 

 

In addition to this, our Summer issue of Invest In Style will be completely digital and with this, we are exploring opportunities to further promote our magazine and our advertisers and agents that support it. Stay tuned this summer to access quality lifestyle articles and incredible listings, all from home! Follow our Instagram page and Facebook page for further announcements about this upcoming issue.

 

We have also created blogs providing resources to support you during these trying times:

 

Tips for Working From Home Through COVID-19

Navigating Mental and Physical Health While Working At Home During COVID-19

One Way to Have Fun Together While Bound at Home

Mortgages Procedures Impacted by COVID-19

Making Sense of Plummeting Sales and Rising Prices

What Airbnb Restrictions and COVID-19 Really Mean for Toronto’s Rental Market