Industry Powerhouses Share Survival Strategies 

All seasoned Realtors® know that housing markets have their ups and downs. But if you asked a sales professional in the early 1980s what to expect in the 21st century, it’s doubtful that anyone could have predicted the transformational trends of technology or the dramatic housing crisis. Yet plenty of brokerages in Northern Virginia have survived and thrived for decades. The companies with staying power dedicate themselves to providing the best possible service to customers while behaving ethically towards every person involved in a real estate transaction. These brokerages do their best to support their agents so the agents can be successful in any market.

“People buy people before they buy a product or service, so we know that finding and keeping great agents is important,” says James Weichert, Jr., co-president of Weichert, Realtors® in Morris Plains, New Jersey. “We have an associate-centered business philosophy, with every decision focused on our agents’ success so that they can reach high levels of production with a minimum of hassle.”

"Top real estate brokerages don’t settle for mediocrity," says Dean Cottrill, president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage for the Mid-Atlantic Region in Annapolis.

“I come to work every day thinking of how I can improve personally, and our top leaders do too,” says Cottrill. “We share the values of integrity, trust and credibility, and providing customers with an extremely high level of customer service.”
 
Every successful brokerage recruits and trains excellent Realtors® and experienced leaders who can set the tone for those agents and provide support.

“Everyone in a leadership position at McEnearney Associates has more than 30 years of experience in real estate,” says Maureen McEnearney Dunn, president of McEnearney Associates in McLean. “Our agents trust them to make decisions that are good for the agents and for their business. We’re well-known as big sticklers for all the rules and regulations, and we hold everyone who works with us to the highest ethical standards.”

“We share the values of integrity, trust and credibility, and providing customers with an extremely high level of customer service.”

Scott Avery, co-founder and president of Avery-Hess, Realtors® in Dunn Loring, says his company’s culture is both top-down in establishing the value of always treating people the right way and bottom-up in setting a collaborative atmosphere in which the leadership supports agents and listens to their ideas.

“Our company has been in business since 1992 and has never paid one dollar out of our errors-and-omissions fund,” says Avery. “This comes from our culture of treating people right. We view ourselves as consultants to our agents and provide them with as much training as possible.”

One characteristic shared by many of these successful brokerages is that their office managers do not sell real estate.

“Our recipe for success is that our branch leaders don’t compete with our agents for sales,” says Todd Hetherington, CEO of Century 21 New Millennium in Alexandria. “We have a written, documented budget and business plan that our leadership must follow. It’s the job of the leaders to recruit the best agents, train them and coach them.”

Every one of these brokerages has adapted to fluctuating market conditions and to technological changes that revolutionized the real estate business. 

LESSONS LEARNED DURING THE DOWNTURN
All real estate companies had to cut expenses when the market slowed, says Dunn, but McEnearney avoided staff reductions by eliminating superfluous expenses such as print advertising.

“It was a key time to look into what was truly helping our clients, so we invested in the Internet and our infrastructure,” says Dunn. “It kind of forced us into learning to use technology better and to push our agents to use it more, too.”
 
Avery says it’s crucial for companies to pick up signals in the marketplace and to be prepared for belt-tightening.

“Back in the fall of 1994 we were watching Wes Foster [of Long & Foster Real Estate] pulling back ads and we wondered why. Then there was a pullback in the market in 1995, and we realized he had the insight into the local market that every successful company needs,” says Avery.

Hetherington says Century 21 New Millennium reallocated its resources to focus on working smarter and harder to continue to earn accolades from customers. 

“Everyone has a ‘let’s start doing this’ list, but in a down market you need to have the courage to have a ‘let’s stop doing this list’,” says Cottrill.  “We never lost sight of our vision to provide the highest quality tools, the highest quality leadership and the highest quality coaching, but we also had the guts to make tough decisions about what tools were working and which ones weren’t.”

Cottrill says Coldwell Banker works with each office manager and a regional advisory committee of sales professionals to make decisions. In addition, he says that each office has an advisory committee of agents that functions like a board of directors to support Realtors® in that specific marketplace.

“There were 4.1 million homes sold nationwide in 2009 and 2010, even during what everyone recognizes was a terrible housing market,” says Larry “Boomer” Foster, Jr., president of general brokerage of Long & Foster Real Estate. “We looked at it this way: we needed to sell a higher percentage of those homes to keep our business going.”

At the same time, Foster says, the company was adapting to the fact that agents were becoming more mobile. 

“Agents can do business with their handheld devices, so the old brick-and-mortar model changed,” says Foster. “During the tough times we were able to downsize our space and invest the savings into our agents.”

ADAPTING TO THE TECH REVOLUTION
These successful brokerages invested in technology even during the slow market, but they also took the time to determine which tech tools were the best and to provide training for their agents.

“Agents feel they need to get particular products. We look at what’s available, bring it to them and explain the benefit to their customers and to themselves, and evaluate how well we can teach agents to articulate that benefit to consumers,” says Avery. “Technology isn’t our business; engaging people is our business. We help our agents understand how to use technology and social media to increase their engagement with consumers.” 

Foster agrees that while investing in technology is important, it should also be viewed as a tool to build relationships, not a “be-all, end-all” in itself.

“Technology forced changes in the industry and on us as a company,” says Foster. “Agents and brokers are no longer the keepers of information. Now we need to serve as trusted advisors who are knowledgeable about the market and are great negotiators.”

Weichert says his company’s tech strategy has been to invest millions in: 1) marketing to maximize hits, and 2) a lead generation system that provides immediate, instant service seven days a week to arrange a buyer consultation or an appointment to see a property.

“Real estate is a relationship business at all levels, and those relationships are based on trust and accountability.”

“We know that time constraints are a big issue with consumers, so we’ve worked hard to provide them with the best in Internet shopping as well as integrated services in their local Weichert office,” says Weichert.

Coldwell Banker invests heavily in technology and provides support staff so that agents don’t need to become tech experts, says Cottrill.

RECRUITING AND RETAINING AGENTS
Cottrill says he has a two-interview process when recruiting agents to make sure they are compatible with the company’s values and goals. 

“We talk with recruits and agents about why they’re in the real estate business so that we can create clarity about what they want to do and what the money they earn will do for them,” says Cottrill. “We try to make everything as simple as possible because when they have tools available that are easy to use, they can accomplish incredible things.”

Weichert says their sales agents are trained to work with buyers and sellers whether prices are up or down, interest rates are high or low or inventory is abundant or scarce. He adds that even though his company is one of the largest in the country, the company thrives because of its local leadership.

“Every one of our sales managers has been an agent,” says Weichert. “Our number one source for recruiting new agents is through referrals from our own agents. We retain our agents by constantly motivating them and supporting them with one-on-one coaching, weekly training sessions, weekly sales meetings, office caravans to new listings, sales contests and by bringing people together on a regional basis for rewards and incentive trips.”

Long & Foster also offers extensive training through webinars, live training sessions in offices, outside trainers and agent development by managers to retain their agents. Any Long & Foster agent can go to a training session in any office, says Foster.

“If you can’t get trained here, you can’t get trained anywhere,” says Foster. “We offer coaching and mentoring to new agents. We find it’s pretty easy to attract agents to our company because of the family atmosphere, our strong brand and our market dominance. Our agents stay because we teach them time management and how to have consistent success.”

Hetherington says his managers are all certified mentors with Brian Buffini, which he says gives them an edge when recruiting because they can train agents with Buffini’s methods. 

“We provide what I call ‘pack meetings’ twice a month, almost like a Weight Watchers weigh-in where all the agents share their challenges and their successes,” says Hetherington. 

While Dunn says McEnearney’s office managers provide coaching to their agents, she explains that some of their stellar agents also teach other agents.

“We have a good sense of community in our offices,” says Dunn. “Our philosophy is that we need to keep recruiting the agents we already have and offer everything to experienced agents that we would offer to a new recruit. We overwhelm them with love.”

INNOVATIVE BUSINESS TECHNIQUES
Foster says the concept of family is important to understanding Long & Foster’s  success.

“Not only are we a family-owned, family-focused business, but we own a family of businesses that are accountable to us,” says Foster. “Our company can be everything to everyone from first-time buyers to buyers and sellers of upper bracket homes because of our affiliation with Christie’s. Consumers have the peace of mind that comes from knowing they can work with great agents, lenders, settlement agents, insurance agents and even property managers, all within our company.”

Weichert says a guiding principle of his company has been to add services for consumers whenever possible.

“Not only do we provide financing for buyers, we have a corporate housing business, property management and franchising opportunities, all of which provide diversified income streams so that when one aspect of the business is struggling others are doing better,” says Weichert.

Weichert has been expanding outside its Mid-Atlantic footprint through franchises with independent brokers for the past 12 years, and has offices in London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada. Weichert says once the U.S. is covered, the company plans to expand further internationally.  

“One thing that helps [Century 21] stay strong is that we have a great geographic footprint from Baltimore to Richmond to Orange County,” says Hetherington. “We’ll continue to make acquisitions of brokerages in other areas as long as they fit our geographic goals.”

Hetherington says his company focused on bringing in third-party relocation business. In 2014, 2,000 of the company’s 7,000 transactions were relocations.

“The conversion rate on relocation leads is 52 percent, compared to a conversion rate of 2 or 3 percent on most Internet leads,” says Hetherington. “That’s worth its weight in gold.”

Coldwell Banker’s plans for the future include centralizing as many processes as possible to ease time constraints on managers and agents.

“We’re allocating resources so that our offices have more support staff who can directly work for agents,” says Cottrill. “We’re centralizing the contract review process with specialists to create efficiency and to speed up the process for our customers.”

Regardless of the business model chosen by these brokerages, all of them understand the fundamentals of the industry.

“Real estate is a relationship business at all levels, and those relationships are based on trust and accountability,” says Foster. 

Survival Tips from Top Brokerages 
• Stay ethical and committed to responsible real estate practices
• Provide your agents with the support and training they need to be successful
• Invest in technology – and train your agents in how to use it efficiently
• Focus on retaining the best agents as much as on recruiting new ones
• Adapt your marketing and business methods to changing consumer needs
• Develop and stick to a business plan that can be modified as market conditions change
• Be ahead of the curve in watching for real estate trends

Michele Lerner is a freelance writer based in the Washington, D.C. region.