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Estate News: Rising to the Top |
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Real estate agent succeeds even in slow market
By Don Speich
November 12, 2006
Sherrie Faber isn't a DNA realty agent. If she were, she would never have won the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce's business-of-the-year award.
A DNA, explains Faber, who with her husband, Dane, owns First California Realty in Sausalito, is a young person right out of college who got into the real estate business a few years ago when people were standing in line to buy multimillion dollar homes. New realty agents made lots of money selling properties to family members - hence, DNA agents - and then ran out of customers.
 If they were able to hang on, she said, they were finally relegated to the gone-bust heap when the red-hot housing market started to cool, and they were too inexperienced to stay in the game.
"I went to Macy's the other day and saw a couple of rather well-known people in real estate working behind the counter," said Faber, 44, who has little patience for the "one-day wonders" who got into the business to make a fast buck in a market they thought would be booming forever.
Though business has cooled, Faber said it remains good. The big difference, she said, is that homes that once easily sold within 30 days of going on the market can now take between 30 and 120 days to sell, which increases the expense of running a business because of the additional ads and open houses and other things it requires to move a home from seller to buyer.
The trick, she said, is knowing how to cut costs without cutting services to those trying to sell their homes.
"It's very expensive to be an agent," she said. "Our dues to (real estate organizations) and our electronic keys"- which allow agents to get into homes for sale and provide instant information about which agent is selling a home and to whom- aren't cheap.
"It costs about $2,000 a year between dues and equipment." So, with the recent downturn in the market "we're really rethinking our budget."
On the table is how much should be spent on each home for which the firm has a listing "because it is taking so much longer to sell."
"Listings are 90 percent of our business ... because we have not been seeing a lot of buyers recently," she said.
Still, Faber, whose company is only two years old, said business is hardly bad. Last year, she said, the firm had $19 million in sales. "This year looks like it is going to be significantly better," she said. Over the past four or five years, she said, "50 percent of the agents in the county have gotten out of the business." In the end, she said, the cream rises to the top and means that "10 percent of the agents make 100 percent of the sales."
Erik Cederholm, an executive recruiter from San Rafael, put his mother's Sausalito home up for sale with Faber following her death. Faber liked it so much she ended up buying it herself. He said he and his wife found an instant rapport with Faber, who he speaks of with great fondness. "The woman could charm the birds out of the trees," he said. "And beneath that charm is a very quick mind and ethics above reproach.
"She is a bright light in a profession full of cynics; the longer people are in real estate, the more they see that can go wrong and the more cynical they become." Not so with Faber, he said.
The key to success, Faber said, is knowing the community in which you work as well as being part of it. "What makes a difference is that we are active in the community" in service clubs and a variety of civic activities. She said it is important "because your name is out there all the time."
Sausalito Mayor Ron Albert, who has known Faber through her work in the community said, "She is a terrific lady, high-energy, very intelligent. "She is very active in the Chamber of Commerce and she and her husband, Dane, were a great help on the Measure S campaign." (Measure S was a bond measure approved by voters to construct a new public safety facility in Sausalito.) "We used their offices to run the phone bank operation" to contact voters, he said.
Jeff Scharosch, president of the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce and general manager of the Spinnaker restaurant, said Faber received the chamber's business award this year because "of her leadership in the community. She is very involved in many activities from the chamber to the Yatch Club. "She is a great person with the community. She will do anything to help."
Faber, a native of Maryland who has had jobs in a variety of areas, says real estate is "a calling." She said that a few years ago her husband, who runs the commercial development end of the business, urged her to try real estate. "He said to me that with all they things you've done - interior design, retail sales - you'd be fantastic at this."
She got her real estate sales license and went to work for a firm in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter she made her first sale. She called her mother. "Mom, I found it," she recalls saying. "This is what I was meant to do all my life."
Faber was a music major in college, playing the piano with, at least initially, a future tied to music. After college, she made a living by giving piano lessons but ultimately gave up the notion of music as a profession because "I was not good enough to make a living at it."
Prior to opening her business, she worked as an agent for five years for Peg Copple & Associates, with offices in Sausalito and Kentfield, where she learned the business. Copple said Faber "was a new agent when she joined the firm. She was full of energy, very willing to work, happy, friendly and completely willing to learn my methods" for running a small, independent real estate firm. "She built up a strong understanding of the business, and she became very successful in her own business.
"We are good friends."
Faber depends on people knowing her civic work as well as advertising in newspapers and magazines.
Her 3,300-square-foot office has separate offices for the five agents who work there plus other personnel. There is a Japanese influence in the furnishings and lots of plants that give the office a quiet ambience. It features a conference room with an oval glass table, leather chairs and a cabinet of Asian design which she informs a visitor is a bar. "We're constantly celebrating something," she said, laughing.
The office is dog-friendly. Faber's black lab, Jake, is often an office fixture.
Dressed in a black pant suit with a white open-neck white blouse, Faber talks with great affection about the business and those who work there.
She explains, fighting back tears, how difficult the first year was emotionally. Right after giving notice to Copple, she found out her father had terminal cancer, this coming only months after she suffered a late-term miscarriage that devastated her. "My children are now my nieces," she said. She has four sisters, three of whom live in Marin or San Francisco and all of whom are in some way connected with housing or real estate.
She is friendly and outgoing and outspoken and optimistic. "I fully expect that by spring of next year" the housing market "will be growing again," she said.
In the meantime, she said homeowners "of any price (home) are going to be fine if they can stay in the property for three years. "If you are concerned about your house, put money into it and it will be worth it in a few years."
Patience - and cookie dough - are the secrets to home sales, she said.
It's all part of "staging" in which an agent fixes up a home for sale that is vacant by putting in new carpet, furnishing it, and taking other measures to make the place as appealing as possible.
And on a Sunday when a home is open for viewing by potential buyers, Faber will bake cookies in the house. The pleasant aroma of cookies gives a prospective buyer a feeling of being home - and baking them provides something delicious to munch on. "People stick around when cookies are cooking," the savvy agent said. It's even better when on a chilly Sunday afternoon, there is a fire in fireplace.
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