Sales success
How I Found My Niche
Real estate practitioners share their stories of how their personal interests bring focus to their real estate sales business.
BY HALEY M. HWANG
Your niche in real estate says a lot about who you are—and sometimes reveals much about what you’ve been through and what you care about most deeply in life.
Many real estate practitioners develop their niche after years of experience cultivating their client base, with enough time under their belts to realize that they really enjoy a particular aspect of the industry or that their business has increasingly evolved from a particular market.
Others—such as those featured here—specifically go into real estate because of their personal experiences or passions. Oftentimes, for them, the niche came first and the real estate came second. They share their stories of how they targeted their way to success.
The Passions of the Practitioner
Passion is the key to finding a niche in real estate that will make you happy and successful, so say many real estate practitioners who have let their inner passions guide them in the right direction.
Geography—Sometimes, you decide that you want to live somewhere, and everything else becomes secondary in importance. That’s exactly what Sally Young did 30 years ago, when she decided she had been mugged one too many times in Philadelphia, and she hated hot weather. So she picked up and moved to the very rural Tok in eastern interior Alaska, where the population was 350 people at the time. The town fit the two criteria she was looking for—it was as cold as Iceland, but the residents spoke English so she didn’t have to learn a new language.
Young, broker-owner of Rural Alaska Real Estate, couldn’t be happier. She fell into real estate 23 years ago because there were no newspapers or social workers in town—the two fields she was trained in. Now, she’s the only practicing real estate broker in town, covering an area of 54,000 square miles with a population of 1,395. Young handles about 30 transactions a year, and her main forms of marketing are advertising in a small biweekly newspaper and on a big Plexiglas bulletin board in the local grocery store.
“I think the key is to find the place you like first, and then figure out what you like about it, and that’s what you’re selling,” Young says.
Jolie Powell, broker/owner of Jolie Powell Realty Inc. in Port Jefferson Village, N.Y., couldn’t agree more.
An avid tennis player, Powell says that she moved to Port Jefferson Village on the North Shore of Long Island because the village provides country-club amenities that include tennis and golf-club memberships at a preferred rate. Powell has been a member of the Port Jefferson Country Club since 1987, competes competitively in the tennis ladders, and focuses on the three-and-a-half square miles of Port Jefferson and neighboring Belle Terre villages, which comprise fewer than 5,000 homes total.
Powell says she’s a household name in these two communities, and is No. 1 or 2 in both markets, with 97 percent of her business coming exclusively from these two communities.
“My lifestyle came first and then it became a part of my business,” Powell says. “My business is my lifestyle. To me, it’s all about the passion. That’s why I do believe in niche marketing. You can’t have a passion for everything.”
Charity—Some people may choose a career because it allows them to live the life they want to live, with a little left over to provide to the charitable causes that they care about.
Jim Smith, broker-associate with RE/MAX Alliance in Lakewood, Colo., on the other hand, specifically began working in real estate just so he can help raise money for Habitat for Humanity. He donates 10 percent of his commission from every transaction to Habitat in his clients’ names.
Smith says that there are a lot of people in the world like him who have contracted “infectious habititis”—a bug that infects you with the commitment to help Habitat for Humanity. He says that he contracted the so-called affliction in 1994 when he volunteered for the Jimmy Carter Work Projects to build a home on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation.
“I worked side-by-side with the family who got that house, and I really got a feeling that you don’t get from other kinds of charity work and that you don’t get from just sending in checks,” Smith says. “I like Habitat because it is a charity that helps people escape from poverty for an entire family. It’s like teaching someone to fish instead of giving them food. You’re teaching them how to live.”
In his first full year in real estate in 2003, Smith was able to donate $10,000 to Habitat for Humanity and the Colorado Association of REALTORS® Housing Opportunity Foundation (CARHOF), which supports Habitat. This year, he hopes to double his donation to $20,000.
Smith can afford to be generous. The MIT graduate, who also once ran for mayor of New York City, is the former owner of Journal Graphics Inc., which provided transcripts for television shows and public affairs programs such as “Oprah,” “60 Minutes,” “20/20,” and “Nightline,” for more than 20 years before the business closed in 1997.
“It’s what gives me the freedom to be a generous REALTOR®,” Smith says. “Real estate is something I do to make additional money for myself but also to make money for a cause I believe in.”
Hobbies—Cheri Peterson, a sales associate with Prudential Select Properties in St. Louis, Mo., has been a Harley Davidson enthusiast all of her life. Her father was a motorcycle cop, and she and her husband David married got married at a Catholic church with motorcycles lined up outside.
Peterson says she always rode on the back of a motorcycle until David’s death in a motorcycle accident in 1993. She then went out, took a driving safety course, and got her own license. She also got her real estate license the same year and didn’t do very well at first.
“Then one day someone said, ‘Cheri, figure out a niche—make it something you enjoy doing and incorporate it into your business,’ so I went out and took a picture on my Harley,” Peterson says. She had business cards made with the photo, which shows her sitting on her prized bike wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and a visor. She also placed the photo on a giant billboard on I-94 in St. Charles County.
Everybody in the area has come to recognize her from the following billboard:
Peterson says that, in the beginning, there were some snickers from other real estate practitioners about her Harley niche. “I came up with this idea and everyone made fun of me and thought that it was stupid,” she says. But her business took off and she had the last laugh.
In 2003, Peterson closed 124 transactions with $20 million in sales volume. She has three assistants who work with her, and she is in the top 2 percent of all of Prudential’s sales associates nationwide.
The majority of her clients and referrals come from her participation in the Women on Wheels® Motorcycle Association, Harley Owners Group®, American Motorcyclist Association, and Bikers Against Child Abuse.
Peterson encourages others to develop a niche that truly makes them happy—no matter what other people think.
“No matter how dumb it sounds, there’s a way that you can put it together to make it work,” Peterson says. “I blew everyone out of the water, and business just keeps getting better and better and better.”
Personal Hardships Can Lead to a Niche
On the flip side of self-discovery, some real estate practitioners fall into the industry or discover their niche through painful personal experiences.
Jay Goscinski, a sales associate with GMAC Real Estate The Kee Group in St. Claire Shores, Mich., went through a personal foreclosure—an experience that helped him realize that he wanted to work in real estate sales and specialize in foreclosures so that he can try to help others in similar situations.
Goscinski, who owned a high-end residential and commercial remodeling business for 10 years, was hit hard by the downturn in the economy after Sept. 11, 2001. He also was going through marital and family problems. He said that he found himself facing foreclosure during this difficult time and turned to one of his biggest business clients—a self-proclaimed foreclosure specialist—for help. Instead, Goscinski fell prey to what he calls an equity-stripping scam.
The experience made him want to help others in his situation with honesty and compassion. In the 10 months since he attained his real estate license, Goscinski says that he has listed more than 60 foreclosure properties and is the No. 1 foreclosure specialist in his market.
“I said someone can do this legitimately and I’m the one to do it,” Goscinski says. “Honesty is No. 1. I spend time with people even when I don’t see dollar signs, and I help them find other reputable professionals to work with. I educate them about the process and what all their legitimate options are.”
Goscinski gets great satisfaction out of his new line of work and his chosen niche.
“I love it,” he says. “Helping people is just a wonderful feeling. I love seeing people come to the closing table who may not get a dime back, but they’re saving their credit, getting their life back, and getting a fresh start.”
A fresh start is just what got Peggy Spiro into real estate and her chosen niche—women in transition, whether as a result of divorce, the death of a spouse, or some other major life event.
Spiro, ABR, a sales associate with Realty Executives Performance Group in Lafayette, Colo., was married at the age of 19 for 32 years—during which she sacrificed her own communications career for a large commercial real estate firm in New York to follow her husband in his career and raise two daughters.
When that perfect world fell apart with divorce in 2001, Spiro found that she had to pick up the pieces and restart her life. She joined a “divorce recovery class” for women and found that there were a lot of other women facing similar situations.
So Spiro decided to restart her career in real estate—this time in residential sales—and try to help other women. Spiro says some practitioners may not completely understand the needs of divorced women, who sometimes make homebuying decisions based on emotions or nostalgia instead of choosing the right property for their current needs.
“I have knowledge of what they’re going through,” Spiro says, “I understand how sad and hard it is, and how very painful. There are times that we’re sitting in the car and crying together.”
That empathy has paid off, helping Spiro build a loyal client base in the 15 months she’s been practicing real estate.
“I really feel that it’s part of my responsibility to guide them, for their needs and not mine,” Spiro says. “I think most of the time that people are very appreciative that I’m working for them as their advocate.
“At the end of the day, I really like dealing with this population,” Spiro says. And that’s the advice she would give to other practitioners who may still be looking for a niche.
“Do something you love,” she says. “If you love it, then it will work. Because you have to do it everyday, you might as well love what you’re doing.”
