If there ever were a wake-up call for Gwinnett's real estate industry, 2008 has been the year nearly every realtor heard the ring.
"The first thing that they need to do is create a business plan that adapts to our current environment," says Sandy Andrew, "realizing what has worked for them in the past and looking at which of those things will work in the current environment."
Andrew, president and CEO of Suwanee-based AtlantaNewHomesDirectory.com, spoke to home builders and realtors last month at a seminar called "How to Survive – Strategic Planning for 2009," hosted by Touchstone Homes at that company's headquarters in Suwanee.
Andrew, a former realtor herself, says the first major challenge for realtors is simply to figure out "the types of buyers that are able to buy homes now."
Realtors, she says, "need to identify opportunities as to which sellers and which homebuyers are actually going to be able to act in 2009 and then create a plan to maximize their ability. For example, with sellers, they really need to know how to price a home properly because it's not going to sell if they can't. And with buyers they need to know if they can get a mortgage before a realtor even gets them in a car to look at homes."
Andrew stresses the need for realtors not just to use the internet, but to understand how the web is changing the relationship between homebuyers and their realtors.
"What has changed is that homebuyers are going online and Googling Atlanta homes for sale and finding websites like our company's, and that's where the process is starting," she says. "So what realtors need to do is as soon as they get an internet lead they need to provide additional information quickly to help the homebuyer.
"They need to take that internet prospect very seriously because that internet prospect is going to narrow it down to a few houses and they'll go to a realtor with, chances are, three or four or five houses they want to see. The realtor's job is to facilitate that transaction. It used to be that agents were the gatekeepers to the listings, that's not the case anymore."
Andrew says the 2008 market doesn't have much tolerance for part-timers and moonlighters. She says the current tight real estate market requires a total focus on running a real estate business like a profitable and efficient corporation.
"An agent that's going to be able to survive in 2009 has to be very on-purpose and make a concerted career choice and treat it like a real business," she says. "They need to treat their job as a realtor as if it were a corporate job, because if they want to create the income like a career they need to treat it like a real job."
And don't be surprised to see a shakeout of realtors who couldn't compete with more dedicated and thorough colleagues.
"There have a been a lot of agents that have come into the marketplace in the last few years because they see the potential," Andrew says. "I really think those agents will be looking for other jobs."
She stresses to realtors that, above all, now is not the time to sit back and wait for customers to walk in the door.
"They need to seek out past clients that have given them biz in the past. They can't afford to be passive and still survive."
