People in Real Estate

Profiles by Mary Umberger

Real estate agent hits road in search of nation's capitols

By Mary Umberger, Monday, January 2, 2012.

Real estate agent Sara Zittlow with sons Andrew, 11 (left); Ryan, 7; and daughter Megan, 9.

For the past several months, Sara Zittlow said the people she's encountered seem to think that she's either: a) nuts, or b) lucky to be living out a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

On the "adventure" side, she's taken a leave from her real estate career and has embarked on a road trip that will take her to all 50 states. more...

Former economist offers discount, FSBO real estate services

By Mary Umberger, Wednesday, November 16, 2011.

Sign up Lori Alden to help you purchase or sell a home, and as a bonus, maybe she'll also help you get a grip on those supply-and-demand concepts that receded from your memory after you waded through "Econ 101" in your college days.

That's because Alden, who has run her own real estate brokerage for more than four years, also holds a doctorate in economics and lectured on various areas within the discipline at the college level for more than 20 years. more...

Rentals hold key to real estate market's future

By Mary Umberger, Monday, August 22, 2011.

Cheryl Russell has one word for anyone who's adrift and looking for any direction in real estate, so long as it's up: rentals.

The rental market is "a possible savior for many segments of the housing market," said Russell, a demographer who specializes in studying Americans' housing and spending habits.

To say that Russell isn't particularly encouraging about the near-term prospects for the housing industry would be an understatement.

Having crunched mountains of census and other data to glean the habits and attitudes of groups of actual and potential homeowners, from 20-somethings to retirees, she finds them generally scared off or stuck, and predicted they'll stay that way for two decades to come.

Russell's company, New Strategist Publications, recently published its third edition of "Americans and Their Homes: Demographics of Homeownership." It's not the stuff that you're likely to lose yourself in at the beach -- unless, of course, you're another demographer. It's a pricey ($90 to $270, depending on the version) festival of numbers and spreadsheets, delving into such arcania as how many black householders are 45 or older, or how many people use oil to heat their homes. more...

Fighting cancer with social media

By Mary Umberger, Wednesday, August 17, 2011.

Clint Miller, left, with his son, Aaron.

One morning not long ago, Lance Armstrong awoke to find 400 messages on his Twitter account asking him to contact Clint Miller.

Miller works for a real estate lead generation firm in Missoula, Mont. Lance Armstrong is ... well, Lance Armstrong.

What the two have in common is testicular cancer. The seven-time champion Tour de France bicyclist is famous for having overcome the disease, and has set up a foundation to provide support to cancer patients.

Armstrong's immediate response to the tweets was to post a YouTube.com video greeting for Miller urging him to get well.

"I just wanted to let you know that I'm thinking about you, hope you're doing great," Armstrong said. "And yes, I'd love to hook up sometime, go for a bike ride, go for a beer, whatever you want, man. In the meantime, get better, hang in there, and live strong."

It was just one more post in the tidal wave of social media support that has washed over Clint Miller since he was knocked flat by cancer about a year ago, and the bloggers, tweeters, video-makers and Facebook commentators of the real estate business took notice. more...

Aspen broker trades up from snowboard sales to ski chalets

By Mary Umberger, Wednesday, July 13, 2011.

Steven Shane thinks F. Scott Fitzgerald got it wrong. No, Shane said, the rich are not different from you and me.

"Absolutely not," said the Aspen, Colo., real estate broker, who went from selling snowboards to selling ski chalets among the glitterati and other well-heeled types who frequent the town. They're just normal people, Shane said.

Granted, they may pay millions for homes that they'll occupy only now and again. Or they may specify that any house they purchase must have a separate servants' entrance.

And sometimes, the deal-making can turn incredibly complicated -- like the sale of a simple duplex that turned into a six-sided transaction worth nearly $12 million overall and involved buyers from the United Kingdom, California and Colorado.

But generally, real estate clients in tony Aspen have the same likes and dislikes -- and the same quirks -- that agents encounter in less-stratospheric price brackets, he said. more...

Century 21 Real Estate CEO climbs for a cause

By Mary Umberger, Wednesday, June 29, 2011.

Century 21 Real Estate President and CEO Rick Davidson.

When British climber George Mallory was asked in 1924 why he wanted to scale Mount Everest, he very tersely and very famously replied: "Because it's there." Rick Davidson is a little more specific about ... more...

Former TV anchor shares 4 real estate video tips

By Mary Umberger, Monday, June 27, 2011.

SAN ANTONIO -- After more than a decade in broadcast news, Cynthia Lee was ready for something new. So about a year ago, she became a real estate agent. But she found she wasn't quite ready to leave the cameras behind.

Along with a former colleague from the Fox television affiliate in San Antonio, where Lee had been a reporter and anchor for 12 years, Lee founded a production company that makes video home tours for agents.

"I don't regret leaving TV news -- I was done," she said. "And I do love real estate. But I'm having a ball. I've kind of found my niche."

Although she spends her days selling houses (with $3 million in transactions in her first year, she said) as an agent for Kimberly Howell Properties, she and business partner Heather Chandler also run Videocast Now in San Antonio.

The team creates home tours that range from slide shows of still photos with voice-overs, to video walk-throughs conducted by Lee. They also make promotional video bios that agents can send to prospective clients. more...

Real estate agent's novel idea: mystery writing

By Mary Umberger, Monday, May 9, 2011.

In 2003, Vicki Doudera was sitting through the first hour of the first day of her real estate licensing class when it dawned on her: She could craft a career in mystery writing from the material she might encounter in the real estate business.

"It hit me -- I had found my world in which to set my fiction," she recalled. "You've got great settings, luxury homes, and you're getting a peek into people's worlds.

"You have a lot of human drama, you see passions, and you have a lot of things that can go wrong," Doudera explained. "There's a lot more to this than meets the eye."

She went on to get her license and works as an agent for Camden Real Estate Co. in Camden, Maine. She relegated the idea of real estate agent as gumshoe to the back of her mind until one day three years ago, when she sat down and started writing. more...

Realtor braves frigid bay waters ... more than 80 times

By Mary Umberger, Monday, April 25, 2011.

When someone suggested to Kathie Hewko in 1976 that she should try swimming across San Francisco Bay, she wasn't buying it.

"I said, 'Are you crazy? There are sharks out there and the water is freezing!' " she recalled.

Apparently, she got over it. On April 17 she completed her 80th swim across the bay and under the Golden Gate Bridge, reaching the tip of Marin County in about 30 minutes.

She hasn't encountered any sharks in the bay, she said. And as for the water temperature -- well, it is what it is. Fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit -- which was the temperature when she swam on April 17 -- is no big deal, she insists. She's seen colder.

"The first time I swam to Alcatraz Island, it was 45 (degrees), and that's about as cold as I've done," said Hewko, a Petaluma, Calif., real estate agent.

In sickness and in health, Hewko has been participating in organized, open-water swims for 35 years. In addition to the many 1.2-mile San Francisco Bay crossings -- that she refers to merely as "the Golden Gate" -- she has traversed the depths in many parts of the U.S., as well as in Canada and Europe. more...

Real estate broker who turned away Gadhafi takes up new cause

By Mary Umberger, Monday, March 14, 2011.

Jason Haber heads his own, newly minted real estate brokerage in New York, and he has Moammar Gadhafi to thank for it.

Not that the infamous Libyan dictator knowingly inspired the Manhattan agent to found Rubicon Property, but Haber said his perspective on life and business took a significant turn on the day when he told Gadhafi, in effect, to take a hike.

Haber's in-your-face response to the Libyan government's attempt to rent a Manhattan townhouse for Gadhafi during a United Nations visit in 2009 generated an avalanche of media attention and an outpouring from the public -- and from one woman in particular -- that changed him, he said.

As a result, in September he and his brother, Cory, co-founded a "social entrepreneurial" brokerage with a real estate business model tied directly to philanthropy. But he had no idea this was in his future when he fielded an e-mail over Labor Day weekend in 2009.

"It was from somebody who said, 'We're looking for a townhouse in Manhattan for a visiting Dutch (United Nations) delegation," said Haber, who at the time was an agent for Prudential Douglas Elliman. more...

Real estate agent reinvents herself as tech diva

By Mary Umberger, Tuesday, February 22, 2011.

In 2010, after owning what she describes as a "fairly traditional" real estate brokerage in Stockton, Calif., for 15 years, Nicole Truszkowski decided to reinvent herself.

She chose to become a technology and social media diva.

She figured she might as well. The recession had whacked the luxury-home niche that was her specialty at the brokerage she owned, so she decided to relocate to California's Monterey Coast -- her "favorite place in the world" -- and affiliate with Sotheby's International Realty in Carmel.

Sensing a relative dearth of tech-savvy agents who cater to international buyers in her new market, she leapt into Facebook, Twitter, blogging, texting, online lead-management, and an avalanche of apps that she said make her job easier -- yet nonetheless absorb hours of her workday. more...

High-profile real estate regulator finds new career as agent

By Mary Umberger, Monday, February 14, 2011.

Many real estate closings come with a certain amount of tension, but novice real estate agent Erin Toll Glover has come to expect more than the usual amount of anxiety emanating from across the closing table.

Closers at title insurance companies have told her they're terrified of her, she said.

"People are always aware of my past," she said, laughing. "The biggest hurdle has been to get people to see that I don't hang upside-down in a bat cave and sleep in a coffin."

That's because Glover -- when she was known professionally as Erin Toll -- comes to the closing table with no small reputation.

Until June, she was the director of the Colorado Division of Real Estate, where she was known as an aggressive enforcer of the rules. Before that, working in the state's Division of Insurance, she uncovered a wide-ranging kickback scandal in the title insurance industry. more...

Real estate 'Rookie of the Year' is no newbie

By Mary Umberger, Monday, January 31, 2011.

As "rookies" go, Julie Scott isn't exactly a real estate newbie. She's not even terribly new to the business of selling new homes, having taken on that specialty five years ago when she went to work for a custom builder.

But she's novice enough for an arm of the National Association of Home Builders, which earlier this month named the Suffolk, Va., agent its "Rookie of the Year" for her strong performance in a period that was an "annus horribilis" (Latin for "horrible year") for builders in general, by anyone's measure.

Things were so glum in homebuilding -- 2010 was the worst year since the U.S. Department of Commerce started tracking it in 1963 -- that the NAHB's National Sales and Marketing Council scaled back its "top rookie" criteria from those who had been in the business under two years to include those who had been selling for builders for six years or less, according to a spokesman for the awards coordinators.

Scott, however, wasn't having a terrible year. Aided by the homebuyers' tax credit and market demand from military personnel in the Norfolk area, she helped move a more-than-respectable number of houses: Averaging three transactions a month for a local tract builder, she sold about $8 million worth of new homes from November 2009 through October 2010. more...

Breaking into real estate video

By Mary Umberger, Monday, December 20, 2010.

Hillary Caston's acting isn't the stuff of Oscar nominations. Not to be unkind, but it would be sort of a stretch even to call it acting.

As real estate marketing goes, though, it's certainly unique.

Caston, a Prudential California agent in Laguna Beach, makes videos to showcase homes for sale. But these videos aren't the predictable slide shows set to music or the agent walking through the house with a camera, announcing -- as if you couldn't tell -- "Here's the kitchen."

Instead, we may encounter her online in used-car pitchman mode, talking at warp speed and begging us to "Come on down!" to her "Used-house Extravaganza!" She dashes around the home and touts its granite countertops and stainless refrigerator as if they were antilock brakes and side airbags. more...

Teen blogger digs luxury real estate

By Mary Umberger, Monday, December 13, 2010.

Cole Perkins pretty much gets it that he's not exactly your average 13-year-old. For one thing, he's totally uninterested in video games. And he attends "cyber school" -- a home-schooling arrangement that tethers him to a classroom teacher via computer.

Then there's that blogging thing. Where other kids might be blogging away about sports or television or popular music, that's just too mainstream.

Cole Perkins blogs, instead, about luxury real estate.

He recently became something of a real estate keyword after Curbed.com posted an item about Lavish-Property.com, his fledgling site that each day features a new-to-the-market estate in North America or Europe, with extensive photography and his commentary. more...

Battling real estate unemployment

By Mary Umberger, Monday, December 6, 2010.

Two years ago, when Ron Weaver first became aware of how hard the economy was hitting people who worked in the real estate industry, he thought again and again about his father's struggle to support his family during the Great Depression.

"My father dropped out of ninth grade and he drove a truck the rest of his life," said Weaver, a land-use lawyer in Tampa, Fla. And in the darkest years of the Depression, he anxiously took that truck on distant, lonely and sometimes perilous routes, Weaver said.

"It was what had to be done for his family," he said.

Weaver sensed that some members of the real estate community in Tampa might be struggling, silently, in a comparable way today. He estimates that 30,000 people in Hillsborough County, Fla., which encompasses Tampa, have been affected directly or indirectly by what he terms "the real estate and construction calamity." more...

He wrote the book on luxury real estate

By Mary Umberger, Monday, November 22, 2010.

Want to cut a swath in luxury real estate? Write, Jack Cotton says, and then write some more.

Can't write? Hire someone to write for you.

Cotton practices what he preaches, having published his second and third books this year, with two more in the works.

"Writers are perceived as experts," he said. That's something that's particularly important in his specialty, luxury properties, where Cotton has learned through 30 years in the business that people of wealth want to deal only with experts, no matter what the field.

Writing is just one of the paths to success he outlines in "Selling Luxury Homes: Become the Preferred Real Estate Agent and Trusted Advisor to Today's High-End Clients." more...

Getting fired can be good for business

By Mary Umberger, Monday, November 15, 2010.

The boss belittled him on national television, calling his work "a total mess." And then he fired him.

Wade Hanson frowned and lumbered out of the boardroom and into a taxi, yet another in a long line of "Apprentice" wannabes who had taken a figurative kick in the behind from Donald Trump.

Was he dejected? Regretful?

Nah.

"I'm the most well-known real estate agent in Minnesota now," he said in an epilogue to the end of the Oct. 16 episode, in which his team went down to an inglorious defeat. more...

Picking up real estate pieces in divorces

By Mary Umberger, Monday, November 1, 2010.

Sometimes, the most satisfying days for real estate agent Joan Rogliano are the ones when she goes to a listing appointment and the homeowner decides not to sell.

Rogliano, who owns Rogliano Realty Group in Littleton, Colo., specializes in sales related to divorce, a niche she began to cultivate after her own marriage ended several years ago and she became painfully aware of the confusion and anxiety that can surround that major marital asset.

"When you're going through a divorce, you're out of control, for the most part," she said. "You're scared to death. Your friends say to do one thing with the house, your kids say another. Here I was, a Realtor, and even I wasn't sure of what to do." more...

Selling chateaux in Bordeaux

By Mary Umberger, Monday, October 25, 2010.

A few years ago, Michael Baynes and his wife were sitting in a hotel in La Jolla, Calif., contemplating the next phase of their lives. They tried a little experiment: Each one would scribble out the place in the world where they'd most like to live. They passed the notes across the table to one another. Both had written "France."

And that, more or less, was that.

Today, Baynes is selling vineyards and chateau properties in the Bordeaux region in the southwest part of France, aiming to put an Anglo-American spin on real estate practices in a country that's famous for going its own way.

In 2006, Baynes, who had been a partner in a real estate development firm in Newport Beach, Calif., had wound down his principal business and was working as a consultant to local developers when he decided to make the leap, though it wasn't the first time he had crossed the Atlantic in order to build his career. more...

Hollywood discovers Realtor, songwriter

By Mary Umberger, Monday, October 18, 2010.

Singer, songwriter and Realtor Dennis Lambert. Photo courtesy of Dennis Lambert.

Just about the time Dennis Lambert was noticing that the phone in his real estate office wasn't ringing so much, Hollywood called.

It was no big deal, really -- only that actor Steve Carell was interested in making a film about Lambert's life.

Lambert seems to take this little thunderbolt rather calmly, as if it's just one more interesting detour in a life that has wandered over multiple maps.

"It's a little crazy, my story," said Lambert, 63, acknowledging with considerable understatement that he's probably the only real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., who also has a wall full of gold records, garnered in an earlier life as a songwriter and music producer. more...

Reinventing 'lifestyle' marketing

By Mary Umberger, Monday, October 11, 2010.

Miriam Peters, of Peters & Associates, sells the luxury lifestyle. Photo courtesy of LR Photography.

Nick and Miriam Peters would rather be known as the "lifestyle" real estate agents than as the "sexy" real estate agents.

But "sexy" is what some people are calling them, and the couple shrug it off. That's because business, they said, has exploded in the month or so since they started marketing their listings with sometimes-provocative photography of real estate agents and models in the houses -- wearing lingerie, lounging on a bed, even in the bathtub.

"That's how we've been portrayed in news articles," said Miriam, who heads Peters & Associates, a six-person brokerage in the Charlotte, N.C., area that specializes in luxury properties. "They've spun it as 'sex sells,' but that isn't exactly what our campaign is about.

"It's supposed to be about lifestyle," she said. "It was misconstrued." more...

Real estate video duo mix humor, news

By Mary Umberger, Monday, October 4, 2010.

more...

Young broker makes waves in Kansas

By Mary Umberger, Monday, September 27, 2010.

Scott DeNeve is used to being the youngest businessman in the neighborhood.

At 7, he tucked tomatoes from the family garden into paper bags and went door-to-door, selling them to neighbors.

At 9, he was mowing lawns -- with a vengeance -- eventually earning enough from 16 regular customers to pay for his own riding mower, plus two go-karts and bicycles.

At 24, he started his own real estate brokerage. That was five years ago. This month, Platinum Realty ranked 129th on Inc. magazine's list of the country's fastest-growing companies. more...

'Best Dressed' title suits Florida Realtor

By Mary Umberger, Monday, September 20, 2010.

Angel Ramos. Photo courtesy of <a href="http://www.alisonchurch.com">Alison Church</a>.

Angel Ramos is getting dressed for work.

Custom-tailored suit, check. Custom shirt, check. Custom tie, check. Vintage cufflinks. Handmade shoes.

No socks, however. Not even custom ones. You got a problem with that?

Ramos, a Miami real estate agent who spends a lot of time contemplating his wardrobe, says that showing a little ankle works just fine among affluent businessmen in the South, and you should believe him. more...

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