I built a real estate office at 57 West Geneva Street. I did this because I needed a place to work. You’d be surprised to learn, or maybe you wouldn’t, that Realtors often work from home. This work is equal parts appointments and office work, but the office work is just phone calling and typing, and if you own a home without small children clamoring about, you could easily do this from home. I have clamoring children, and so I have this office. I sit here and I type, I call, I sit on the couches and read. This is how I office.
The traditional real estate office is nothing like mine. I use my office to work, whereas other agents use their offices to generate leads. This is why there are offices in downtown spaces that lack convenient parking. Who cares about parking when you have so many people walking by and in, seeking condominium rentals on the north side of Elkhorn? One step further, this lead generation is why there are offices at the entrance to Geneva National and Abbey Springs. These are offices engineered, successfully so, to dominate the activity in those developments where they reside. This is a good plan, and it works.
But what it doesn’t do is stop the effectiveness of outside firms within those gated boundaries. It is true, the broker that owns those two offices inside those two developments carries out the bulk of the business within those boundaries. Is this a good thing for the consumer? Is this the only way to find success within those gates? If property is owned in either GN or Abbey Springs is the only way to either buy and sell to employ the on site broker? Of course not.
This spring, I listed the home at 62 Saint Andrews Trail in Abbey Springs. It was a fine house, and I only represented the sale because I had previously worked with the owner on other endeavors. As those were successful undertakings, I was employed. Once employed, I struggled to find my bearings with that home. I struggled to understand the market, to understand how to incentivize other agents to bring me buyers. I struggled because I was an outsider. I struggled because I didn’t have an office inside those gates.
Just kidding. I didn’t struggle at all. I closed that sale last month for $746k, but only after fielding two offers one weekend and locking in the better bid. The same situation holds true for a property I recently listed in Geneva National. Outside agents, or so the story goes, can’t have success in the associations without access to the prized walk-in traffic. But that new listing in Geneva National found a buyer rather quickly, just like the Abbey Springs listing.
Moral of the story; sometimes an outside approach works as well as the standard approach. Find a competent agent. Hire the competent agent. Make sure your agent incentivizes the agents to sell your house. Then, sell your house. This isn’t really that hard.