One-person real estate offices are on the upswing. We asked a longtime one-person-office veteran, Sheila Prager, of Sheila Prager, REALTOR®, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to explain how she operates, as well as the pros and cons of "going it alone."
At 62 BJ's Wholesale Club grocery superstores along the East Coast, people are shopping for 50-roll packs of toilet paper, 10-pound packs of chicken, and discount real estate services, including mortgages.
These three vignettes, though humorous in retrospect, show that managing listings often ends up as an exercise in damage control. But there's no need to be the cleanup crew if you know how to prepare for a few snafus.
More practitioners are setting up home offices as primary or secondary places of business, say industry observers. The trend has been particularly noticeable the last three years. Economic as well as technological factors are behind the change.
We asked Don Harlan, CRB, CRE®, and Gail Lyons, CRB, CRS® to explain some of the challenges of tomorrow they explored in their latest book, The Future of Real Estate: Profiting From the Revolution. Here are some of the changes they see ahead for residential practitioners.
Todd Payne, SIOR®, principal at Goodfellow--Ashmore Commercial Real Estate Services, Danbury, Conn., saw a golden opportunity in medicine. Payne didn't change careers. Instead, he opened a medical-leasing division and believes it'll soon become a major part of his business.
Joseph Silvey, senior vice president of Realty USA, a 10-office company in Clifton Park, N.Y. reflects on his company's experiment with paying salespeople by salary rather than commission, a concept his company implemented last year at one of its offices and shut down just six months later.
