Founded in 2011, Timms Real Estate is a real estate marketing firm with 22 staff and 150 properties under management. The agency moved to a 700-square-metre office in Lonsdale in early 2022.

Its acquisition, announced last week, will see Timms trade as Ouwens Casserly Real Estate Lonsdale next month and integrate itself with the larger firm’s systems and processes.

The acquisition will add to Ouwens Casserly’s existing office network which spans the Adelaide CBD, Henley Beach, Kensington, Unley and Willunga.

Timms founder and director Valerie Timms, who will be taking up the position of southern and Hills sales manager at Ouwens Casserly, said she sought the partnership to relieve some of the pressures of running a business the size of Timms.

“I just woke up my morning and thought about my next 10 years and wasn’t certain that I wanted to be a solo business owner,” she said.

“The idea of being a small to medium enterprise and running it like a large corporate, which you need to keep up these days, it’s really a fast race to be running when you’re a solo business owner and you don’t have scale.

“So I had a significant number of projects on my next 18 month list, and I looked at those and thought, this is significant.

“And I felt that scale was important, and I thought which company has already completed all these projects that I’m about to invest in?”

Ouwens Casserly, founded in 2014, sells more than 1000 homes a year and manages nearly 1700 investment properties. It currently has a headcount of 113 people.

There’s still room in the Adelaide market, I believe, for some exceptional times ahead.

Timms said the acquisition would bolster Ouwens Casserly’s marketing capabilities and help the firm establish a larger presence in the Hills and southern suburbs.

“The whole idea with Timms was that it’s kind of like a marketing company that just happened to sell houses,” she said.

“We had some key standout marketing and the aim was to have clients for life, so there was a real focus on customer service, community engagement as well as innovative marketing.

“I guess the idea for them acquiring a business such as Timms… we sell across Adelaide, but there’s a prominence in the south and in the Hills, which was an area that they probably weren’t as dominant in.

“It really kind of fitted a big piece in the puzzle of their (Ouwens Casserly’s) extraordinary growth, I’d say they’re probably arguably one of the fastest growing SA independent companies.”

Timms Real Estate’s Lonsdale office is currently undergoing a renovation to match Ouwens Casserly’s orange branding. The acquired firm will be plugged into Ouwens Casserly’s online systems on Tuesday.

Timms said she was looking forward to focusing more on real estate sales in her new role.

“The real estate market is ticking along nicely, especially in Adelaide,” she said.

“What I’ve seen on the ground is really great days on market, properties are moving quickly.

“It was definitely seeing the market start to shift in terms of not being the mega boom that we’ve seen, obviously we’ve seen interest rates going up consistently for some time now and that is affecting some people’s budgets.

“But overall, there’s still room in the Adelaide market, I believe, for some exceptional times ahead.”

Ouwens Casserly joint-managing director Alexander Ouwens touted the acquisition as a “critical next step” to his firm’s growth.

“Assembling the right squad is important, and we are delighted to have partnered with Valerie and her all-star team,” he said in a statement.

“Having known each other for 15 years, our relationship with Timms is based on trust.

“We share the same set of core values and strive to provide outstanding service for our clients – making us perfect partners.”