The Proud Owners Of a Great Real Estate Office
by Carol
When my husband and I first married he was studying for his CPA exam while working as an accountant for a car dealership.
I was a real estate agent who had gone through initial schooling to become a real estate salesperson, and I had just gotten through the licensing to be a real estate broker.
In our state it's necessary to go through those stages to attain even the right to sit for the broker's exam.
Meanwhile I worked for another broker thereby making me split my commissions with that office.
Things were really ?moving? at that time, and real estate was selling like the proverbial hot cakes, so it was only natural that I urged my husband to get his salesperson?s license. He passed the exam so that all that was needed was to open our own real estate agency.
The broker that I was working for had tentatively planned to finally retire, and thus we thought that we should make her an offer for that real estate business. Once the offer was accepted, we set to working toward opening our office.
The physical location of her office was located in a very high rent district so our first priority was to look for a new location.
We found just the right place easily and began the physical portion of working on the storefront so that our signs were in place, the conference room set up, along with storage closets for records and a copy room for the copier and such.
We also had to work out a deal with the phone company so that each desk in our office would have a telephone, including the receptionist's desk.
The back wall was constructed to contain the numerous real estate books that we'd collected.
The back wall with its library became a focal point of our decoration, as we added a table lamp and two comfortable leather wing back chairs for people to sit in while we researched the MLS system for suggestions of homes they might want to consider visiting.
There were no computers back then, so it was a challenge to find property, as we had to use bulky MLS books and call each office to ascertain that that particular property had not received a contract on it already.
Today, it would behoove anyone starting a real estate office to make sure that there was some way for the associates to hook up their laptops instead.
Meanwhile, as we began selling property and getting wonderful listings, my husband kept the books for us in his spare time, removing the headache of hiring a bookkeeper and perhaps having to pay for a CPA to perform the accounting side of our business.
We also saved money by putting our office relatively close to the local Board of Realtors, enabling our associates to use their plat maps and other services instead of having to purchase those specific items.
It took a little while for us to recoup the money we?d borrowed to buy the realty, as we?d borrowed money from my parents to do so, but we became the proud owners of a great real estate office quite soon actually.
