The Ark Group , a Buy1GIVE1™ Founding Business Partner, through one of its companies, Ark Total Wealth helps people to create, build and protect their wealth so they can have, do and be all the things they want in life. Their mantra is ‘taking you beyond what you thought is possible’ and it is this concept, that resonates so clearly with Buy1GIVE1.

Paul Dunn, Chairman of Buy1GIVE1 (and blogger on this site), invites us to imagine a world where the power of the business transaction is leveraged to create a new paradigm; a new way of thinking about how we create our businesses so that every single transaction makes a positive difference. Paul challenges us to go beyond what we think is possible.

Mark Falzon, CEO of The Ark Group, has taken up this challenge with Buy1BUILD1™. Every time a home is purchased, AUD$1,000 is contributed to Tabitha Cambodia, a group that builds homes for the underprivileged in Cambodia, and provides them with the means of saving and buying it for themselves.

This is what Mark had to say about their new way of doing business in the world of real estate:

What we help people to do is create wealth and one of the best tools to do that is real estate. There are a number of ways to build wealth in your life through businesses, shares, markets, stocks and savings—a whole range of different things.

From a very practical level, real-estate is an incredibly powerful tool when it’s used right in a wealth creation strategy. One of the key reasons for that is that real-estate allows you in a reasonably secure way to get a significant amount of leverage in your wealth creating portfolio.

Wealth is about creating a large pool; an asset base, and mixing that with time. If you can create an asset base sooner, by using leverage and have that working for you longer, you can significantly increase the amount of wealth you can create.

We think property and real estate is a crucial part of the wealth creation plan. We also think property is a critical part of our whole society. Houses and places to live form a foundation of society and family. If we can help people to create wealth through using a tool that at the same time helps families to have the space to live, and to express themselves, you’ve got lots of benefits coming out of that.

Imagine that if we, as a wealth creation group, could encourage other wealth creation groups to work with other property groups around the world. And if developers started to make a contribution then when you run that forward 15-20 years and think of the difference you could make on the planet and in the next year, we could sell five or six hundred properties in Australia: that’s five to six hundred homes we could build for families in a developing country—and we are one small business.

Imagine if one hundred or one thousand small businesses did this around the world for the next 15-20 years. Imagine the difference this would make. You are talking about the creation of thousands and thousands of homes for people and making a substantial difference to the lives of so many people on the planet.”

If you are in the real estate business, imagine approaching your developers and suppliers, like Mark Falzon, and asking them if they would like the opportunity to gain some leverage, and make a difference. One model already successfully used is that when you sell a particular project to a client, the developer of that project contributes to the worthy cause. There is only positive gain to be experienced.

Click here to listen to a recent interview with Mark.