Family Culture, Use Of Technology Help Realtor Thrive

REAL ESTATE: Windermere’s Approach Attracts Sales Agents

By NED RANDOLPH
San Diego Business Journal Staff

Windermere Exclusive Properties President Steve Rodgers has built a reputation on finding opportunities in tough times.

The former CEO of Carmel Valley-based Prudential California Realty, San Diego’s largest residential real estate agency, has found a new home at Windermere Exclusive Properties, one of the two Windermere real estate franchises in the local market (the other being Windermere Pacific Coast Properties owned by Brian Arrington).

Rodgers, who was laid off a week before Christmas after cutting $25 million from operations and downsizing 250 employees, says he was considering starting up his own company. But when he was approached by Windermere Exclusive partners Mark Loscher and Jim Browne in February, he discovered a boutique culture he liked.

“People are getting a little leery of big, huge corporations with all the bailouts and everything. My perspective is that people are looking for something a little more locally run and operated — something family-operated and less about corporate profits,” he said. “Windermere seemed to have that feel.”

Residential Real Estate Data Skewed

An apparent mistake in San Diego home sales figures reported by the nonprofit Sandicor to the California Association of Realtors vastly overestimated the number of sales going back several months.

For instance, instead of a reported 89.1 percent increase in year-over-year existing home sales in May, the increase was actually 6.5 percent. Instead of a 63 percent increase year-over-year home sales in April, the increase was actually 20 percent.

Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist of the California Association of Realtors, said the group plans to issue revised numbers July 27. The revisions could go as far back as spring 2008.

Sandicor CEO Ray Ewing said July 2 the glitch appears to be human error that began when Sandicor upgraded its MLS system around late August 2008. Prior to the upgrade, Sandicor had been sending one home sales report to the National Association of Realtors, which included pending home sales, and a separate report to the California Association of Realtors, which did not include pending home sales.

After the upgrade, Sandicor began sending CAR the same report it sent to NAR.

“I believe what happened was we gave them something that wasn’t seen in the past,” said Ewing, who said the numbers may be off from September 2008 until now. “I can understand the error. We introduced the new number to CAR. Our assumption was they would ignore it.”

Instead it appears that CAR counted pending home sales with final sales, Ewing said.

Kleinhenz said the glitch wasn’t identified until last week when an East Coast real estate analyst, Thomas Lawler, pointed out in a newsletter the discrepancies between the California association’s numbers and those reported by MDA Dataquick of La Jolla, as well as his own numbers.

Kleinzhenz said one of the reasons the mistake went undetected for so long is that in some California markets, there were more than 100 percent gains.

“An 89 percent gain in sales doesn’t seem all that implausible because over the last several months many areas had huge gains in sales — from 50 percent to 100 percent, and some areas had 200 percent gains year-over-year,” Kleinhenz said. “Eighty-nine percent looks like a large number compared to 6.5 percent, but it’s not all that implausible. It fit into the ballpark of what we were seeing.”

Kleinhenz said the mistakes are not consistent throughout the year.

“And some points in time the information may have included the pendings, and at other times it did not. We’ll have to go back and revise the entire series,” he said.

He said the MLS is more designed for listing information rather than tracking it.

“It’s kind of an art to figure out how to pull right the line-by-line information that can be used in our reports,” Kleinhenz said.

-Ned Randolph

San Diego’s Best Home Deals

By NED RANDOLPH
Special to San Diego Magazine

The stumbling economy is producing bad news in many sectors, but for homebuyers there’s good news out there, too. The recession is producing some bargains. Where and how do you find them?

IT’S A BUYER’S MARKET, but finding the best home deal in San Diego still means kissing a lot of frogs before finding your prince. Contrary to popular belief, the market is full of activity, though it’s a market fraught with hurdles that include frenzied short sales, damaged homes and, sometimes, overly aggressive real estate agents.

While median prices in some neighborhoods in Chula Vista and Southeastern San Diego have dropped by more than 40 percent since their 2005 peak, more-affluent markets, like Solana Beach and Kensington, are holding up better. The fact is, good deals vary widely with ZIP codes.