Twenty Years on the “Road Less Traveled By”….
Home Buyers Relocation Services:Our 20th Anniversary — Twenty Years on the Road Less Traveled By….
An Overview, in 4 parts: (a bit long…but we hope the serious reader would want to know…)
1) What We Are Today - 2) In the Beginning - 3) The Enduring Business Plan - 4) Expectations
Today, as originally intended, we still are a small, highly personal, specialized real estate agency, exclusively for buyers, primarily supporting families relocating into southwest Illinois….executive, military and otherwise. Our domain is area-wide, but focused on finer homes in the best relocation venues. Paul and Merrill Ottwein, son and father, were and are the principlals of the company. This basic business model has not changed in these twenty years, except for many enhancements, the plan deliberately and carefully matching the service to the unique needs of relocating families. .
In January of 2011, we will have been in this service niche for 20 full years, during which time we have not taken a single real estate listing. But we have served more than 3000 home buyer families with consistent win-win results….our buyer satisfactions are consistently high, and so therefore, are ours. It’s been such a pleasure serving this classy group, and often, their sponsors as well. Even more than we anticipated, they feel the differences and appreciate the delivery of truly professional services.
We’ve had comfortable offices in two great communities for nearly all of these years, friendly, functional and easy to find. With decor more brassy than classy, the family atmospher prevails. Paul is the broker of record in Edwardsville, Merrill in O’Fallon. While centered in top communities, others are easily accessible. Resources within have built, too.
We are not very large…just 5 active licensees at the moment, with another on medical leave, but we consider ourselves an elite highly professional team, on the “high road” of real estate representation. Our long-held measure of service is that we intend to deliver that which we would want for ourselves and our family. So we’ve always been very focused on quality as opposed to quantity, and we will not compromise the overall level of service for the sake of growth.
In addition to the satisfactions born of delivering top service, our reputation is of paramount importance to us. The majority of our clients are referrals from other clients, or from companies that we have otherwise served, a trust we won’t betray.
We’ve had, in fact, astonishing stability in our staff. Paul and Merrill have each been here the entire 20 years of course, but three others are all in the range of 15 years to 18 years. (The total years all of us have been in the real estate business is in the high hundreds). This kind of stability is unheard of in the profession. We call ourselves in fact, “disciples” of exclusive buyer representation…we obviously like and respect each other, and very much believe we’re functioning at a very professional level, and that’s satisfaction itself.
In the very beginning, more than 20 years ago,
As a market segment, relocating families had, (and have,) attractive characteristics. They are almost always serious, dedicated buyers, with a short buying-time window. They tend to buy larger homes. They are intelligent and educated, and very discriminating in many ways. They are often very experienced…except they are can be “babes in the woods” in their understanding of a new area. (They therefore are considered a class “vulnerable” to problems with agent representation.) Their experience often includes some bad events, so many are students of agency relationships. Finally, we suggest a bit tongue-in-cheek, they are an attractive market segment because they have no cousins in the business.
We quickly determined that a relocation specialty was worth consideration, but to be done professionally, it would require special characteristics. So then started the “specification” process for determining the ideal business model.
In approaching that design, we determined the best service would need these characteristics:
Deep knowledge of the best relocation venues, area wide———-Experience in the business, area wide.—— A highly professional, even sophisticated level of service. ———A deep body of resources, freely delivered long before clients come to town. ——-A willingness to always commit the best agents to one-on-one service when scheduling actual community visits.———Probably, a team approach, to pool the experience and knowledge.——A totally open (now called transparent) service, full disclosure, absolute loyalty. ———-Hospitality that we would want for ourselves….off the chart. ——–In service terms, a level greater than common expectations justify.——-In terms of emotions: ultimate comfort, confidence, convenience.
As these studies progressed, it was obvious that whatever good intentions otherwise prevailed, the package could not be consistently delivered without eliminating the potential for conflicts of interest, a policy of NEVER serving sellers. We came to feel that we needed in fact to eliminate not only the reality but also the perception of potential conflicts of interest….that buyers could only be open and comfortable with us under those circumstances. It therefore had to be absolute….even a few listings would seriously jeopardize the comfort and confidence we intended. That really upped the ante.
So we considered this most carefully, and had learned there were a few others around the country experimenting with it. So our research included ranging a bit to distant places, visiting with these other pioneers. Adding to the magnitude of change this suggested, real estate service in the entire nation at that point considered itself as serving sellers exclusively, and laws supported hat. Adding to the pressure for change was that most buyers thought they were represented but indeed were not. A watershed study of nationwide consumer attitudes by the Federal Trade Commission in 1983 found that over 80% of all buyers thought they were being represented, but in fact, were not.
Finally, we carried from the beginning an attitude that if we were going to do it at all, we were going to commit to doing it well, enhancing the differentiation, serving at the highest truly professional level possible. We felt that clients would know and appreciate the difference…and they certainly do!
So therefore was the business plan finalized, and it hasn’t been diluted an iota over the 20 years, except that we’ve found additional avenues of service borne of the separation of representation; it’s amazing what additional opportunities we’ve found in that fact. Of course technology has taken us into a new world, although we still adhere to a lot of old-fashioned stuff….hospitality, for instance. A good specific example is that we still have a policy of having a human person answer the phone, even forwarding the office phone to one of the principles after hours and weekends and a few other older-fashioned ideas of personal service. Otherwise, we’ve tried to stay “with it”! We have great tech support in our offices, and even have a growing presence on Facebook and LinkedIn. And we have these blogs (soon to get a major facelift and it’s supposed to be a surprise, but a separate new blog is coming called “Family Matters”, for, about,and from our wonderful alumni families.
And the benefits of this fact were a bit of a surprise: we have this wonderful horizontal relationship to the best relocation targets, as opposed to the average agency’s more vertical relationship with a town or two. We often do agent-switches to get the best experience to a client, of course always using the whole team for knowledge and opinion. No other agency around can touch this team’s approach to knowing this segment throughout southwest Illinois.
And we’ve always delivered “Client-Level Service” according to the old, (still valid) Common Law of Agency. It’sa level of service higher than real estate law requires, which calls only for “Customer Level Service,” basically, honesty and fairness. Client-Level Service requires undiluted loyalty, full disclosure and more, which obviously can’t be delivered to more than one party in a transaction. (The Common Law of Agency has been in fact, legally abrogated or attenuated for the entire real estate community. Oklahoma even tried to outlaw the higher-level Common Law service, in 1999, which was quickly struck down by their supreme court as blatently anti-consumer.)
Of course, at the beginning, serving only buyers was considered a form of heresy, but we quickly got past the suspicious issues on the part of traditional agencies, and we now enjoy, (and cultivate, in fact,) a great relationship with the rest of the real estate world…cooperation to the betterment of both sellers and buyers.
In the beginning, we chose to have offices in the two recognized centers of relocation activity, Edwardsville/Glen Carbon and O’Fallon/Shiloh. The Edwardsville community enjoyed the presence of Southern Illinois University, and O’Fallon nestled next to Scott Air Force Base. That decision has been very strongly validated, although there are some great smaller communities around too, that offer a different kind of relocation community. (Glen Carbon was named, in fact, in 2009 as one of the top 100 communities in the
And we had the opportunity to participate locally and nationally in the “Exclusive Buyer Agent” movement, and especially in the formation of The National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents. Formed 4 years after we started our local business, Merrill was a charter member, and in fact, it’s first Treasurer. Serving on the Board of Directors for more than 10 years, he served as its fourth President in 1998. We have contributed, and have gained enormously because of this affiliation. It’s been a great experience for us, especially Merrill. He still contributes to several national real estate columnists and has a wide circle of industry acquaintances. (You might google his name sometime. These affiliations are paramount.)
So the expectations of our buyer clients may exactly follow the specifications outlined in the above story, although we might qualify a few facets of service. (Obviously,our sites abound with other supportive information. For overviews, there’s an “Overview” (duh!) item low on the menu, and nearby, “Differences”.)
Free access to lots of information early still prevails. Our stuff is constantly under construction with major web site revisions on the way, plus enhanced visibility on Facebook and LinkedIn. We still require registration only where rules require, or for certain proprietary products we’ve developed with other agencies, notably, “Homework” and the “Wiser Homebuying Manual.”
We’ve developed a detailed set of promises that are sacrosanct. Among them are the promise to give this higher client-level of service, the promise not to assume a comitment to use our services until agreed, sometimes only after an interview, and a certain list of offenses that “We won’t do!.” The last is based on the fact that not all deception is active….so we’ve tried to identify some passive forms in a reverse set of promises.
And early in our practice we added a “no hustle” pledge. We’ve always felt that decisions needed to be “built” so that when the time comes, they’re natural. And of course, no one likes to be hurried, or “hustled” into decisions before they’re comfortable. So for lack of a better term, we have the “No-Hustle Pledge”. (We admit it’s a bit weaker than the successful “No Wine Before it’s Time” campaign.) And we do not make uninvited phone calls.
We quickly and greatly elevated the importance of resaleability in the specs of our relocation buyers. We consider it, for the whole, and especially the military community, an essential buying goal. That’s all consistent with the principle that we believe we set our clients up to make the most money when they resell the home we help them buy! (We can’t always promise big discounts from asking price, but we can promise consideration of re-sale potential.)
Finally, we’re still committed to one-on-one service with an outstanding, experienced agent while clients are in town. We schedule an “agent-week”, which usually starts on a weekend, or on Monday, with a week being a good conservative average time for a great search to a good conclusion, assuming the client does some homework before arrival, easy nowadays.
But we can’t schedule more than one client per agent, either. On occasion, even already lately, we’ve had to suggest an alternative schedule, or a different agent. And if search times don’t exactly mesh with “agent-weeks”, then we may need to do a bit of tag-teaming with other agents or sometimes, even refer the clients to another agency, heaven forbid! So we need to request careful advance scheduling and very much appreciate the consideration.
There is therefore, a certain incompatibility with local clients, who are in and out over a longer period. While we do take some locals, we do need to warn them of the potential for schedule conflicts, out-of-towners having preference.
Wow….it seems we’ve covered a lot here, even a recitation of our mission, our policies and procedures and even our intentions. As we work in our 20th year, we’re trying to re-work much of our materials, and do hope this is a more interesting way of presenting it.
Enormous thanks goes to all of our former clients, with deep appreciation for their confidence and patronage, and for their many referrals of their friends. That we recognize as a precious gift and we won’t betray that kind of confidence for anything! This has been a wonderful journey for us with enormous satisfactions borne of serving simply-incredible people!
Paul and Merrill