GILROY
– Despite a housing market that’s not exactly red-hot, the ranks
of the county’s real estate agents are swelling rapidly in the wake
of Silicon Valley’s dot-com boom.
Membership in the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors
stands at about 5,700
– up nearly 1,000 in the course of roughly the last year.
GILROY – Despite a housing market that’s not exactly red-hot, the ranks of the county’s real estate agents are swelling rapidly in the wake of Silicon Valley’s dot-com boom.
Membership in the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors stands at about 5,700 – up nearly 1,000 in the course of roughly the last year.
Two hundred new agents are expected at a SCCAOR orientation next month – a crowd that’s so big the association had to rent out a restaurant to pack them in, association spokeswoman Julie Ziemelis said. And the new workforce seems to be highly motivated, she said.
“We’re adding members faster than we ever have in our lives,” Ziemelis said. “They’re falling out of the tech industry and right into real estate.”
Rick Ridder is one of the county’s new agents. The 50-year-old recently started working as a full-time agent through the Realty World South Valley office.
Ridder, who has a background in finance, had previously worked as a controller for a small telecommunications startup. While he enjoyed the work, like many new ventures the company lapsed into financial turmoil.
“They ran out of money,” Ridder said. “You could either work for free or choose to leave.”
In the meanwhile, Ridder had been interacting with the real estate world for a while because he had been considering investing in property for some time.
Joining the profession had several appeals. For one, it seemed like there would always be demand for agents.
“I don’t want to say it’s recession-proof, but people to a large extent will always have to buy and sell houses,” he said.
His finance background also lent itself easily to some of the qualifications.
“The appeal of real estate is that it’s very much about relationships and dealing with people and being able to handle the complexities of doing a transaction,” he said. “There’s just an incredible amount of disclosures and things you need to do.
“I felt that appealed to me, and, because of my finance background, I didn’t think that end of the business would be too complicated for me to learn.”
And because he wasn’t working, he had ample time to study for and get his license.
Ridder notes there’s a lot of freedom in being an agent, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Your reward or income is based solely on your own ability to produce.
There’s the reward of working for yourself and seeing the direct benefit of your actions, rather than having them swallowed up in a corporate structure.
“At a major corporation, there’s nothing more frustrating than to work 60 hours a week and knowing what you’re doing isn’t necessarily getting you any farther ahead …” he said. “Here, if you put in a 60-hour week and put it in effectively it will have a direct relationship on the amount of money you can earn.”
Discipline and willpower are crucial – especially when it’s a bright sunny day and you have golf clubs in the trunk of your car.
“Should I go out for two hours and play golf or should I be doing the things to service existing clients or find new ones?” he asked. “Particularly when you’re new, you need to develop habits that will carry you down the road.”
Ridder said one challenge so far has been the prospect of working through friends and family to publicize his services and find new clients.
“I’m not as comfortable doing that as a lot of people are,” he said. “I don’t want to feel like I’m putting pressure on my friends, so I haven’t done that as much as I could have.”
Susan Starritt Jacobsen of Gilroy’s Starritt Realtors has two decades of experience in South Valley. She’s noticed the influx of new agents, or “greenhorns” as she playfully calls them.
Jacobsen welcomes new agents to the field, but warns that many enter wearing the proverbiala rose-colored glasses.
“Everyone thinks real estate is easy, that you pick and choose your hours and your time (commitment), which is not the case,” she said. “It’s a full-service business, and if you’re not there, the public is fickle and lots of times they’ll just call someone else.”
“I’m happy to see people get in the profession, but it’s not for everybody and people have to find that out for themselves,” she said.
Some of the hardball techniques and tactics used in the corporate sales world may not lend themselves well, for example. Jacobsen knows one agent who pushed hard – and had a couple of transactions backfire.
“(The hard sell) doesn’t necessarily work when someone’s making what many people feel is the biggest and largest investment of their lifetime,” she said. “You have to go slow and make sure they understand that you’ve done a thorough job.”
