Waynesword October 2010--
“Catching Up on Real Estate Changes…”
Whether speaking of economic recovery in the big picture,
or recovery on any kind of personal level, or in the sense of my own chronic lapses in updating THIS website, the same basic phrase applies: You can’t catch up all at once! But we have to start somewhere, so here I go… business news first, philosophical ruminations to follow.
How The Change of Regime (Ready or Not!) Went Down
In our Real Estate World @ 90 East Avenue, Saratoga Springs, NY:
At the end of August (on the 30th to be exact, a Monday), those of us who comprised the Saratoga Office of RE/MAX Premier were summoned to a 4 pm meeting wherein we were abruptly informed that the company with whom we were licensed had ceased to exist, as of the prior Friday. This was a bit jarring, as you might imagine, since we had all been conducting business up until an hour or so earlier as if we were still RE/MAX agents. Though the rumor had spread just before the meeting that another local company was buying out the assets of the Broker/Owner, and that the franchise agreement with RE/MAX of New York had been suspended, we had very little time to react to this news.
In a “normal” business buy-out or takeover, most employees of the company being merged or subsumed are obviously looking to be retained by the new company coming in. But while that would apply to salaried employees, there are very few of those in real estate—we operate in a commission-only environment as 1099 employees, i.e., as independent contractors. Consequently, we all had a tough choice to make—almost immediately—as to whether we would shift our individual licenses to another company, or remain with the company that to become the new Broker-of-Record, and make our best possible deal on commission splits with the incoming regime.
For those of you who understand the real estate business, it is obvious that RE/MAX operates differently than most brokerages. In the classic RE/MAX model, agents retain 95% of their earnings after paying out the first 5% to franchise fees. Then they are billed monthly for all expenses related to management, office rental, phones, secretarial services, advertising, copies, errors & omissions insurance, etc. etc. etc.
We used to joke that only the air and tap water in the building were free: everything else, down to the paperclips, had to be paid for. As a result, the agents who stayed in the system were generally highly-motivated professionals—you couldn’t just coast, you had to produce, or you fell behind in more ways than one. In a good market, it was and is a great model for ambitious agents and associate brokers; even in the recent recessionary market there were several notable agents in the three offices of RE/MAX Premier (Latham, Delmar, and Saratoga) who were doing very well. When I had signed on with this firm a mere 9 months before, after a challenging but ultimately unsuccessful stint with a small start-up company dubbed SPA Realty (R.I.P.), I had fully intended to make my mark as one of the truly productive members of the company, which had the highest per-capita transaction and income numbers of any brokerage in the Capital District. But even though there were several high-profile “heavy-hitters” in RE/MAX Premier as a whole, the company and its owner were in debt and many of the other agents were not paying their bills in a timely manner. The broker/owner was in a bad spot, and had to make a call for help, without much if any warning to the troops under his command, so to speak.
Some of those troops, including my friend and colleague Dan Gaba at the Saratoga office, and several of the very heavy-hitters down at the Latham Office, had never really worked under any other real estate banner than the RE/MAX balloon. Others, like Susan Svoboda, had bought into the system completely, attending seminars and conferences and conventions galore, and were very committed to the RE/MAX manner of doing business. A lot of shock and dismay and indignation was expressed at that first meeting, when the change came down so abruptly.
I was a bit more circumspect. I empathized with the Broker/Owner who had been pulled out of a very humbling position, and who frequently expressed that many of the licensed agents under his aegis were making much more money than he was, while he bore the bills, and the company debt, apparently. Despite that, he had been positive and encouraging to me at a time when I needed it, and I wasn’t one of those who expressed outrage at his actions or predicament. He faced ample recrimination from others in the company, however, whether via email, phone, in person, whatever. I didn’t feel I needed to add to that hubbub.
Once we got beyond his initial admission that the company that held our licenses had been sold, we were immediately introduced to the man whose firm had just been called in to effectively help pull him out of economic freefall-- the eminent local businessman/philanthropist Ken Raymond. Co-owner and President of Coldwell Banker Prime Properties. To paraphrase one of the memorable and recurrent lines from “Jerry McGuire”: He had me at Hello.
Mr. Raymond was calm, dignified, and professional during a verbal firestorm of reactions to what some agents perceived as an unwanted “take-over”—eloquently detailing what his company’s values and market philosophy had been since its inception in 1986, and how it had become the largest Coldwell Banker franchise in ALL of New York State, including the NYC area and Long Island. He spoke of how CB Prime’s corporate reach extended from Dutchess and Columbia Counties to the south up to the Queensbury/Lake George zone in the north, and from the Mass/Vermont border in the east out to Utica and Syracuse in the west. (This was interesting to me as my wife and I had just dropped off Miles at LeMoyne College in the Syracuse area a few days earlier for the start of his freshman year—no other Capital District real estate firms had any kind of presence out there.) Ken also detailed in a very personalized manner how he himself took no money out of the company, as his “other investments” had done so well that he did not need to… how many other business owners can say that? I wondered.
His continuing goal seemed to be to see that the company as a whole thrived, not only for the benefit of its over 500 employees and sales force, but also so that it could continue its corporate good works and give-backs to the community, some of which were charities and funds he proceeded to name. Furthermore, he maintained (and later proved) that he took an active interest in the success of each individual agent under the Coldwell Banker Prime Properties banner, no matter how big the company became. I was impressed at the first meeting, and continue to be. I was the first one in the Saratoga office to say: I’m in.
Eventually, everyone else--with the exception of one 2-person team—came to the same conclusion, and our office remained largely intact. The beauty of the buy-out is that it included Coldwell Banker Prime Properties taking over the lease on our present office at 90 East Avenue, Saratoga Springs, so that none of us who stayed had to move. Their other local office, which had been housed in the back portion of the downtown Post Office building, would be merging into our space, instead of us having to squeeze into theirs. They were thrilled to acquire more modern, extensive office suites in a convenient and visible location, with MUCH easier parking and access, at a time when they had a window to safely exit their expiring lease. By the end of October, all of their pre-existing agents will be joining us former
RE/MAX Premier agents and associate brokers at the stone-fronted office building I’ve grown to like so much.
***
What It Means To Us as Realtors, And To Our Clients:
First of all, we immediately joined the ranks of the #2-ranked powerhouse of Capital District real estate companies (according to the Capital District Business Review, and Greater Capital Area Realtor MLS Statisitics). (RE/MAX Premier, a much smaller company in terms of numbers of agents, had been 5th most recently.)
We joined the largest Coldwell Banker Office Franchise in New York State, whose geographic “bandwidth”, so to speak, extended from Dutchess & Columbia County in the mid-Hudson Valley area to the south of us, out to the Syracuse/Liverpool/Utica areas well to the west of us, and to Queensbury and Lake George to the north of Saratoga. In a national sense, we hadn’t given up anything by way of “BRAND” recognition in the real estate sense; both Coldwell Banker’s golden retriever & logo, and RE/MAX’s red-white-&-blue balloon claim to have about 96% recognition value among American consumers. No one confuses our company image with insurance agents, or antique auction houses, or glossy style magazines, or gold-emblazoned jackets.
At Coldwell Banker Prime Properties, we have the perceived strength of a national affiliation, along with the actual strength of a locally-owner business that has proven its success repeatedly in the greater Capital Region since 1986,
We have a solvent (keyword!) ownership-- benevolent and supportive, but not dictatorial—with systems in place to constantly train, update, and motivate their licensed agents and Associate Brokers,
unlike any company I’ve seen. I testify to this as a (relatively!) old dog leaning lots of new technological tricks even in the first several weeks of association with CB Prime!! They help keep you focused on your core business, helping people buy and sell real estate, instead of making it a multi-level marketing game of trying to get their agents to recruit other agents as a primary goal. The tools and training are all in place for constant replenishment of skills, and addition of new abilities.
Many of the tools and skills involve the Internet and web communications, and I can say that the Coldwell Banker websites, both nationally and locally, are second to none. For the seller clients, there are 40-50 major and specialty websites that quickly pick up our links-to- listings, without any expense to agents, or any delay in dissemination, as long as certain criteria are met.
For new listings, there are requirements for 18 high-resolution photos to be submitted, at which point the property is fully represented on all those websites, where the property is map-able and pinpointed geographically, provided with Google-earth street-views, with full depiction of features. Within 2 weeks, each property will get its own address-based website designation posted on the sign (i.e. www.19heyden-rd.com... which happened to be my first new one, in Troy, after joining Coldwell Banker Prime). As with the RE/MAX system, which initiated such agent-centric practices—the agent’s cell phone may also be posted on the sign for quick, direct contact about a specific property, with the person most interested in describing it to people, the listing agent himself! There will also be a 5-digit property code, which identifies the property through the 800-number posted on the sign, and gives a brief verbal outline of the particulars: price, bedrooms, baths, perhaps size of lot, etc. For any and all of the methods to promote the property or give information on it, the listing agent gets notified, and NO potential interest is fumbled or falls through the cracks—in other company’s systems, I know there are phone flaws,computer glitches, and human error which screws up the process from the consumer’s point-of-view, and the listing agent (much less the Seller) would not even know about it. But Coldwell Bankers’ well-tested, high-tech savvy seems to eliminate those problems, as far as I can tell.
If I sound like a guy who drank the company Kool-aid right off the bat, I can tell you that it might be true, but I was skeptical at first too-- and it doesn’t taste like Kool-aid, it taste like pomegranate juice, or an energy drink—exotic and enlivening. Hopefully, like a change of diet from fast food and soda to something more nourishing… this corporate change will be just what I was looking for in terms of getting my business life on a healthy track again, doing my part to make the recovery real.
This recent change-over, though not voluntary, has been
a POSITIVE catastrophe, so to speak. I now aim for stability and longevity in one place… and do not plan to make any more changes
in my real estate affiliation….ever!
I love the location and the physical space of 90 EAST AVE.,
SARATOGA SPRINGS, and I know that this company is PRIME’d to succeed in the exciting decade to come in the Saratoga County area in particular, and the greater upstate/Capital District region as a whole!!
As Jim Morrison once growled, in between verses …. PROUD TO BE A PART OF THIS NUMBER!!
***
Call me at (518) 316-6420 Anytime to discuss things.
Email me at either: wperras@yahoo.com
wayne.perras@coldwellbankerprime.com
or, wayne@waynewsord.com
My subsequent updates on real estate matters and topics, which will be weekly if not daily, will be found online, at
coldwellbankerprime.com/wayne.perras
and there will be a permanent link to that site from the Waynesword.com from this point on. I will use the Waynesword.com site for non-real estate writing—Hoop & Music musings, some journalistic and geographic blogs, and perhaps a taste of some of my fiction writing.
But this way my real estate commentary will be where it belongs, on a certified real estate site, with a blog I can maintain myself in a much more immediate way than before.
Hope these changes are interesting to some of you…see you
at Siena games, or high school hoop, or around Saratoga/Albany/Troy/
Schenectady or surrounding areas soon.
--- Copyright Wayne Perras 2010