Walter Hall

Walter Hall built three successful businesses from scratch: the first, serving a local market; the second, national; the third, global. In 1960 he founded Walter Hall, Realtors, and by 1968 built it into one of the largest, most diversified and innovative real estate firms in the country. In the process the company became well known throughout the industry. As a result, his real estate firm's Training Division was spun off in 1968 and became The Hall Institute of Real Estate, which quickly emerged as the premier real estate training organization in the nation, often referred to as "The Harvard Business School of Real Estate" within the industry. Starting as an organization primarily focused on real estate agent training, Mr. Hall quickly saw the real need was management development training, which was then totally absent in the industry. This started his life-long quest for researching the best in management principles and then applying them to real-world practice. Seeing an opportunity to apply his firm's knowledge of real estate and managerial principles to the emerging field of employee relocation, he evolved the Hall Institute into Relocation Resources International (RRI) in 1978 which, over the next 25 years, became the largest and most successful privately owned global relocation service firm in the industry competing head-to-head with well capitalized industry giants, such as Prudential Relocation, Cendant Mobility and GMAC Relocation. When RRI was incorporated in 1978, it had negative capital but stayed privately owned throughout its life. When it was sold in 2003, the firm had established credit lines of over $100 million, processed over 18,000 relocating employees and their families around the world annually and had representatives in 118 countries. It had over 200 corporate clients, including such industry giants as Boeing, Capital One, Colgate, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Proctor and Gamble, and Verizon.