I guess you all would want to know where we are at right now, so we will start this story in medius raes. We are a right on the cusp of opening our sales office, we have purchased an EXIT REALTY franchise and have most of the state paperwork done.
That is not where this story starts though,about two years ago we started interviewing real estate franchises to see which ones we might be ok dealing with. I went through more webinars,podcasts, lunches and dinners it is a wonder I could keep them seperate from each other. There are many great companies out there, some embrace technology and some do not. Some value training some do not. My time in real estate has been up to this point split between Weichert Realtors and ReMax. Weichert being the largest independently owned real estate company is set up as a traditional split commision firm. ReMax of course is a desk fee firm. I grew up in the relocation industry,my parents owned a moving company. I learned how crazy it is for home buyers and sellors from their end at an early age. This has helped me to guide my clients through this process as I have empathy for their feelings and the crazieness that the end of the buying process means. I really believe that my being able to see the end of the sale helps me at the begining.
I started with yahoo searches for real estate franchises, after weeding through about two inches of printouts I started researching each company.We had a general litnus test on what we wanted in a company, structure wise, commision etc. So the first cut was to get rid of any discount brokerages. Then I decided to see what the corporate structures and professionalism was so I emailed the ones that at first glance might be a fit. The ones who actualy got back to me made it through the next cut list. You would be surprised at how many of the well known franchises either did not get back to me or took more than a month to respond. One household name franchise even called me two months after the fact and it was the commercial franchise side of the house not the residential. Needless to say we crossed them off the list. I created a plus/minus spread sheet for all of the companies with a gooal of getting us down to a more manageable number. We started this process at 36 franchises and managed to whittle it down to 12 just through this process.
The next entry I will explain the trials and tribulations of changing offices and going to broker school at the same time.
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