Live Urban Real Estate has grown to 50 agents in four years, but owners John Skrabec and Mark White haven’t recruited any of them.
“They have all contacted us,” said Skrabec, who had a 20-year career in marketing and advertising, before becoming involved in real estate, first as an agent, and then at Live (pronounced as in where you “live.”)
The boutique firm, which is gaining a national reputation for innovate and cutting edge marketing, wants agents, who like the firm itself, have a certain urban style and attitude.
Their efforts have not gone unnoticed.
Inman focuses spotlight on Live Urban
Last month, at the the annual Inman News Connect conference in San Francisco – a huge industry event – Live Urban was highlighted as a “Next Generation” Beta Brokerage firm. Pedal to Properties, in Boulder-based firm that specializes in touring homes with clients using bicycles, also was named as a Beta Brokerage firm. Live Urban and Pedal to Properties were the only two firms selected from the Mountain region.
At the Inman conference, Skrabec also spoke on a panel about how to build a brand online, with brokers from the Good Life Team in Austin, Texas, and MRealty of Portland, Oregon. Skrabec’s 10 commandments for brand-building include: Focusing on a specific market area; recreate bricks and mortar offices into a virtual online experience; broadcast a consistent message through all media and mimic the style of your clients, but not of your competitors.
It takes courage to take a risk in challenging times
“Live Urban was identified as a company that is truly a “Next Generation Brokerage,” said Sherry Chris, president and CEO of Better Home and Gardens, who was involved in the selection process. “Live is thinking outside of the box with respect to best practices and that take s courage in these challenging times.”
She also lauded Live for its”savvy branding and focus on new ways of doing business that target today’s active urban buyers and sellers, who love city life.”
At Live, that means hiring agents who reflect their clients.
“If you a like to wear flip-flops and have tattoos, we probably want to talk to you,” Skrabec said, although certainly that isn’t the look sported by most of the agents. Rather, it reflects a company philosophy that Skrabec described this way during the panel discussion at the Inman conference: “Stand out. Be bold. Shake things up. It’s good to be different.”
Live urban: A no-tie zone
While not all the brokers push the fashion edge, you aren’t ever going to mistake a Live Urban agent for an IBM salesman. “Honestly, I don’t think you will ever find anyone at Live wearing a tie,” Skrabec said. That is true from the top down, so to speak. For this interview, Skrabec was wearing shorts, which only makes sense, as he rode his bike to work from his northwest Denver home.
There is one caveat: “If you are going to dress like that, you have to be the smartest person in the room. You can look and dress however you want, but you have to be the best at what you do. ollowing the real estate procedures as required by the Colorado Division of Real Estate,” said White, who handles the administrative and book-keeping for the firm, which operates out of a 1,000-square-foot storefront at West 32nd Avenue and Lowell Boulevard, in the heart of the Highlands Square area of the hip West Highland neighborhood.
“If a broker calls me and the first thing he or she says is, “What will my commission split be,” I know right off that person is probably not going to fit in here,” White said. “If they start asking about their desk, and assistants, and someone to draw up their contracts, they are not the right fit.”
He and Skrabec estimate they hire about 30 percent of the agents they interview. Almost always, they have at least two years of experience somewhere else, because Live Urban isn’t set up to provide the start-up training novice brokers need.
A perfect example of what he was talking about is Live agent Randi Goldberg, White said. As soon as White mentioned her name, as if on cue, she walked past the conference table – adorned with baseball mitts and balls, a whimsical and subtle tribute to the Rockies, as both Skrabec and White are big baseball fans.
Punk rock Realtoress
Goldberg, with sometimes spiky hair, who was only in the office to e-mail some documents to a client, was dressed in workout clothes, as she had just completed one.
“I’m the Punk Rock Realtoress,” Goldberg said. “That is a joke from some friends of mine. If you want a Realtor wearing a suit driving you around, you are probably not the right choice for me, and I’m not the right choice for you. That’s fine. There are plenty of Realtors in suits around.”
She said she is sure there are a lot of other real estate firms that wouldn’t care how she dresses, too.
“There are some real estate firms that ignore how you dress as long as you have a real estate license and a heart beat,” Goldberg said. “But what I love about working here is that John and Mark realize we are all different and appreciate and encourage that we are different. That is different than not caring. They care very much.”
Live Urban No. 1 in NW Denver
Skrabec an architect by training, started Cactus Communications in 1990, but sold his share of the firm about a decade later. He bought and renovated some homes in the Highland area, and found that he liked real estate so much that he joined Nostalgic Homes as a real estate agent. Nostalgic Homes, now under different ownership, remains a competitor in northwest Denver. Indeed, a recent internal study they did found that so far this year, Live Urban has sold 5.7 percent of all of the homes in northwest Denver, and Nostalgic is No. 2 in northwest Denver, with 5.2 percent of the market. And during the past year, Live Urban sold 5.5 percent of the homes, followed by Nostalgic at 4.7 percent. Live Urban is No. 2 in total dollar volume sales, trailing the Kentwood City Properties, in northwest Denver, Skrabec said.
Based on year-to-date sales, Kentwood was No. 1 with $26.7 million, Live Urban No. 2 with $22.4 million and Nostalgic Homes third with $21.6 million. But Corey Wadley, a broker-owner of Nostalgic, noted that his company only has 21 agents, so overall, his agents averged more than twice the sales volume than at Live Urban. “No one lists and sells more vintage residential real estate in Northwest Denver than we do, and we’ve been doing it for 25 years,” Wadley said.
Skrabec said until recently, he hadn’t really monitored how Live Urban was stacking up against the competition.
“To tell you the truth, we hadn’t paid too much attention to market share in the past,” Skrabec said. He and White estimate that 70 percent to 75 percent of their total sales are in northwest Denver, and 95 percent of their sales are in urban Denver neighborhoods.
Last year ,the first closed 330 transactions with a total dollar volume of $86 million. Business is up 30 percent so far this year.
Small, but tech savvy
They are a very tech-savvy office. A very tech-savvy small office.
“We have 1,000 square feet of office space, and I really think we could get by with 500 square feet,” White said. “We talked about going totally virtual, but we thought it was important to have a bricks-and-sticks location in our neighborhood. It makes us more part of the neighborhood. If you are on the 18th floor of a shiny high-rise, you are not really in the neighborhood.”
About 20 percent of their sales, they estimate, are generated from people walking by their high-profile office. As part of their branding, they’ve made their storefront to appears it has a “billboard-like,” appearance, similar to their Web site, .
They’re green, of course
Leaving as small of a carbon footprint as possible, is also paramount. They try to go paperless as possible, buy 100 percent of their electricity from Xcel Energy’s Windsource program, and more than a third of their brokers have earned ‘Green” and “EcoBrokers” designations.
Technology has done away with the need to have brokers in the office, except when they are in the rotation to operate the front desk, take calls and deal with people who wander in. They have no paid staff, such as a receptionist. They use Web-based software, including CTM software for contract prep and execution,file management, record keeping and sales production . They communicate to brokers through a private WordPress blog. They update them daily on market activity, new listings, and blog posts, can order marketing materials through Google Docs. , and sign up for floor shifts at the storefront. Showings.com is used to manage showings with automatic feedback requests, social media sites such as HootSuite and Facebook are increasingly being used.
Two years ago, White stopped selling homes to devote himself to all of the back-shop operations.
Skrabec, White no longer sell homes
“First, I didn’t want to compete with our brokers, and second, I’m so busy running the business-side, I don’t really have time to sell homes anymore,” White said.
Skrabec quit selling homes a year ago. When they receive requests from past clients, they refer them to hand-picked brokers in their firm.
Skrabec handles all of the marketing material, which includes Web videos, photos and text, to select direct mail and print advertising for each home.
“It’s true our brokers have to prepare their own contracts and plan their own (For Sale) signs, but most Realtors are pretty independent and don’t mind doing that,” Skrabec said. “And it is the marketing that is the most time-consuming portion, and we take care of that for them.”
He said at any given time, he is working on a marketing plan for 75 to 100 homes. “That is a full-time job,” Skrabec said. “But that is what I did for 20 years before I started my real estate career. I say I am my own best client. I absolutely love what I do.”
