Meet the family that's been working together since 1957

The Howard Hanna family's third generation is now running its business

Credit: Tyler Nix and Unsplash

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It’s rare than my interests in intergenerational family intersect with my interest in housing and real estate, which is what I write about professionally. But this week, I ended up doing a story for Inman, the publication I work for, that could easily have fit here.

The piece is a Q&A with Hoby Hanna, the president of Howard Hanna Real Estate Services — a multi-state real estate firm that has about 15,000 agents¹. Hoby’s grandparents Howard and Anne Hanna started the company in 1957, and it has remained privately owned and operated ever since. In addition to Hoby — a member of the family’s third generation in the business — there are 10 other Hanna family members who work at the company.

The piece is behind a paywall — subscribe if you’re interested in real estate, I think we do good work! — so I wanted to mention a few things that might be of interest to readers here. But first, one of the core ideas of this blog is that the decisions one generation makes have a direct impact on the happiness, well-being, opportunities, etc. of subsequent generations. Also, families that are cognizant of this fact enjoy advantages that compound over time. That was the point of my piece on my shared ancestor with Sen. Mike Lee.

A simpler example is that my parents chose to have eight kids. I didn’t love that decision as a child living in a crowded house, but I do love it as an adult with a huge family-based social circle. So, some of our happiness depends on how the previous generations laid out the proverbial chess board for us².

And that’s why I find family businesses fascinating. When they succeed, they give people a built-in professional network, career path, etc.

Still, people I talk to often push back against the family business concept. What if someone starts a business and the next generation doesn’t want it? What if people prefer to pursue their professional dreams elsewhere? How does one generation instill in their kids a desire to participate?

As it turns out, Hoby actually talked about many of these things during our conversation. So here, are a few snippets from Q&A:

At one point I asked how present the company was in the lives of the Hanna family while Hoby was growing up:

It was omnipresent. I’m 51 and growing up in the 70s and 80s and 90s we would entertain at our home and have awards celebrations and parties. We always really tried to have this family concept.

[…]

For years, in the 70s, the phones would ring back to the house when I was growing up. I would be answering the telephone at our house at 10 years old saying, ‘good evening Howard Hanna residence, can I help you?’ Because we had customers calling. Everybody was brought into the mix. All of us were as young kids, whether it was putting signs up in the summertime or whether it was helping around the offices making coffee or stuffing envelopes for awards events.

I also asked how subsequent generations became interested in the business. Hoby said it was because of his grandma, and because working in the family business ended up being the most lucrative option:

I think in her DNA [my grandma] wanted to see the family business happen. So she exposed us and in quiet conversations would say, ‘hey, if this is something you want to do you can really make a difference.’ She was a dreamer. She always instilled dreaming in all of us.

[…]

I remember not wanting to do anything with a family business especially when I was in high school and college. Then as a senior in college, the best job offer I had was to go into the management and development program at NVR Ryan Homes […]. But I had nine credits left at the University of Pittsburgh, and I said, ‘what if I sell a little real estate and learn some sales skills in the second semester of my senior year?’ By May of that year, I had fallen in love with the job and had earned in commissions more than what the management development job was going to be.

Hoby also mentioned being raised by a “village” and being taught that he had an obligation to his family.

We were sort of raised by the village. But the matriarch of that village, my grandmother, was always instilling in you that you have an obligation. Not just to yourself, but to your family. And this is the family, not just your nuclear family, your immediate family, but the Hanna family as a whole.

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I’m going to end the direct quotes there because Inman’s paywall is how I earn a living. Subscribe! But I’ll also mention a few other stray thoughts. First, Hoby told me pretty much all of the family members who join the business start at the bottom, as real estate agents, then work their way up. So, the value wasn’t that they all waltzed in C-suite jobs. Instead, the value was in the network, the infrastructure and the ethos of familial obligation.

Second, not every family member has ultimately joined the company. It’s a choice. Also, I’m extrapolating a bit here, but the implication is that each generation had to produce enough people that someone was likely to step in and run things.

Third, the business also had to expand to accommodate more family members. It started off as a single-office real estate brokerage, but evolved into something much larger as more family members wanted to get involved.

I know a lot of people read things like this and think it’s not for them. Which is fine, to each their own.

But I wanted to highlight this piece because it shows that this kind of thing is possible. Everyone doesn’t dislike their family. Everyone doesn’t move hundreds of miles from their ancestral base. Everyone doesn’t insist on starting their career journey from scratch. And not everyone chafes at the idea that extended family members have a sense of obligation to one another.

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Headlines to check out this week:

The Married-Mom Advantage

“As tough as motherhood was during COVID, mothers were both happier and more financially secure than childless women during the pandemic. This gap existed before COVID, but it continued during the worst days of the pandemic and has remained since then. This phenomenon is especially noteworthy because moms, and parents more generally, used to be less happy than childless adults as recently as the 2000s.”

1. The reason I did the Q&A is because the Hanna family was selected as Inman’s Person of the Year. I’m not involved in the selection process for that award, but for the past several years I’ve been the reporter tasked with writing up a piece on the winner(s).

2. That’s not to discount the importance of individual choices. Obviously those matter too. I could theoretically become a senator a la Mike Lee if I wanted. But I think it’s fair to say that I’d face a steeper climb than someone who inherited 150 years worth of political connections. Also, Mike Lee and I are both lucky individuals and I don’t bring him up to suggest I’ve had in anyway a comparatively bad life. I haven’t. I just like the example because our ancestors started off in the same place but ended up in different places.