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| David Romero President & CEO CENTURY 21 Award San Diego, Calif. |
Paige Tepping: Looking back on 2011, how did you manage to sustain business?
David Romero: By looking at how to be efficient as a company and making tough decisions. Not only did we close branches that didn’t make sense, but it was important to not be attached to any of the old ways of doing things and, instead, focus on what we had to do to make it. Because we were able to make these tough decisions when it came to our staff and locations, we are still in business today. In order to sustain business, we had to think about the health of the entire organization and embrace change.
PT: How has your company and your associates adjusted for your particular market conditions?
DR: It’s been a long five years during which only the strong have survived, and the result is an increased professionalism within the industry that was much needed. We’ve been persevering by being nimble about what we need to do to be successful. To that end, we are constantly learning and utilizing new technology in order to be more efficient. Real estate has been and always will be about creating and maintaining relationships, and there are many more ways to do that today with social media. We are always focused on how we can be relevant each and every day, and this has helped us improve our sales force and deliver better service today than we’ve ever been able to deliver.
PT: Where have you invested and where have you cut back?
DR: Technology is one of the main areas that we continue to invest in and there are three goals when it comes to our technology investment. 1. Make agents more productive; 2. Make them more efficient at what they do; 3. Widespread implementation; get people to actually use the technology.
Everything we do has to fit within these three goals. Our full-time social media director is a key player in helping to get the widespread implementation that we’re looking for. Within our company, we have “digital natives”—new, up-and-coming agents that didn’t have to learn technology because they grew up with it—and “digital immigrants”—technology is a second language that they had to learn. We have to make sure we are serving both of these groups.
As far as cutting back, we have consolidated offices. Our offices are now high-tech, very nice places for our customers to come, which enables us to provide a higher level of customer experience. All of our offices have the same look and feel, same set up, so that each of our customers are provided the same experience.
PT: Moving forward, what’s your approach to growing the firm?
DR: There are a lot of opportunities to grow in this environment, and we are talking to a good half-dozen companies that may want to join us and roll in and work together. We aren’t looking at new start-ups, but if there are companies that want to join us and come up with a win-win solution, we’re open to that.
PT: How do you think the overall real estate market will fare in 2012?
DR: I think we’ll see a slight increase (2-5 percent) in the number of units, and an increase between 1-3 percent in prices. The worst case scenario is that we are stable in both areas, which will still be a win after five years of the numbers in these areas being down. However, I predict there will be a small bump in both categories.
Reprinted with permission from RISMedia. www.rismedia.com Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.
