As the real-estate market began to slide, broker Tim Kilgannon decided he had better look at other options.
Kilgannon, managing broker/owner of the HomeToDenver real-estate agency, assembled a team to buy a run-down building at 1526 Blake St. in January 2007. The team spent 19 months renovating the building and had planned to lease it to a restaurant operator. In the end, the partners decided to operate the Blake Street Vault themselves.
Kilgannon is one of numerous real-estate agents who have found alternative ways to make a living as the housing market deteriorated.
“The real-estate company did pretty well in ’07 because the Glass House units were closing,” Kilgannon said, referring to the high-profile condo project in the Central Platte Valley.
“But we saw traffic drop off tremendously,” he said. “At first, it started to be just rental calls we were getting all the time. Then, the rental market dropped off too.”
Jim Winsor, an agent with ReMax Alliance in Arvada, said last year was the first year his income hasn’t increased since he started selling real estate in March 2004. Winsor, who married a year and a half ago, decided to take a part-time job loading UPS trucks to supplement his real-estate career.
“The roller-coaster schedule of income hasn’t been real satisfying to my wife,” he said. “I decided over the long term that income stability was going to be a higher priority than self-employment.
“Real estate just wears on you. When you go three months without a paycheck, it’s unnerving.”
While Kilgannon and Winsor still maintain their real-estate licenses, many other agents have not. In January 2008, more than 77 percent of the agents who were sent notices renewed their licenses. By December, that number had dropped to 65 percent, according to the Colorado Division of Real Estate.
That’s a big concern to division director Erin Toll.
“Because fewer and fewer people are renewing, and fewer people are applying, our costs of enforcement are not being met by the fees,” Toll said. “Our biggest source of revenue is the fees. Our other source is the fines we impose.”
A 60 percent drop in the number of people applying for new licenses prompted the division to double application fees to $500.
Toll also is concerned about a bill prohibiting fees from increasing by more than 20 percent in a year or 50 percent over 10 years that recently was approved by the Senate Committee on State, Veterans & Military Affairs.
“If it passes, it’s the death knell for aggressive enforcement,” she said.
Margaret Jackson: 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com
