Buy! Buy! Buy! Please?

Harrison has been fielding phone calls since 8:30 a.m., soon after her Sunday morning newspaper ad hit doorsteps and driveways all over Southwest Florida. In between, she has had to deal with a crashed computer, help a new assistant set up another open house, and squeeze in a condo showing for a last-minute caller. "When my phone rings, I make it a point to run and answer it," says Harrison, 45. So what are the hours like for an agent who sold $125 million in property over the past three years? "How many hours in the week?" she answers. "When I sleep, I think about this job. I wake up thinking about this job."

The heady days of 2004 and 2005 produced soaring prices and easy sales. Today the market demands tireless work and unlimited ingenuity, and the job of selling high-end property has given many real estate agents sleepless nights in the past year. The Naples Area Board of Realtors (NABOR) reported just 4,501 sales of homes in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) in 2006, compared to 8,864 MLS sales in 2005 and 8,957 in 2004. Median home prices, which doubled in Collier County between 2000 and 2005, went down 13 percent last year. Despite that, analysts at Global Insight Inc. ranked Naples No. 1 among the nation’s 20 most "extremely overvalued" housing markets.

For Harrison, the majority of her single-family home sales in Pelican Bay come from an area bounded by Pelican Bay Boulevard on the west and U. S. 41 on the east. This area produced 31 MLS single-family home sales between November 2004 and November 2005; in the following 12-month period, MLS home sales there plummeted to six. The good news for Harrison and her buyers is that now there is more inventory to choose from, mostly at lower prices. The bad news for Harrison and her sellers is that they are competing against all of that inventory and have to adjust prices accordingly. Getting the two groups together is how Harrison earns her commissions, which can be as high as six percent when the listing is in seven figures.

In some ways, Harrison says she finds the current reality, while challenging, a bit easier to stomach. "I was one of the few realtors last year who did not like the market at all," she says. "I did not think it was a nice market. People were being greedy. I thought it was ridiculous the way things sold so quickly. I didn’t think it was fair to the buyer."

Forged By Adversity

Harrison isn’t dissuaded by the down market, or by much of anything else. When she broke into the business in 1997, a couple of rival brokers told her "you can forget about getting business in Pelican Bay." Harrison landed her first listing within two days. "I met a couple at tennis," she says. "I sold their house to a doctor in town for $750,000, and he’s also been my client ever since."

Ironically, Harrison is making a handsome income selling the kind of homes she could scarcely have imagined as a child. Harrison—"Victoria" Harrison in all of her marketing materials, "Vicky" to just about everybody else—had less than an idyllic childhood growing up in Chicago. She never met her father until she was 22. Largely abandoned by her mother, Vicky was raised by her landlady from the ages of three to 11. When the landlady died, Vicky moved back in with her mother, but couldn’t take the verbal and physical abuse and went off on her own by age 17. Two years later, she brought in her 13-year-old sister to live with her. During all the time that Vicky was finishing high school and attending Northwestern, she worked three jobs. At 22, she married Tim Harrison and the couple went to court to obtain custody of Vicky’s two other younger siblings.

"I may have had a hard background, but you just have to move forward," she says. For Harrison, moving forward means being one of the top 10 producers at Downing-Frye for the past three years—on a roster of more than 700 agents. Her family today includes Tim, a professional home-based financial manager, who dutifully hammers in "For Sale" signs as soon as she gets a listing; son Timmy, 21, a film-school student in Los Angeles; Stephanie-jo, 19, a student at the University of Tennessee, and Maryruth, 12, who attends Pine Ridge Middle School.

So how did this mother of three carve out a successful career as a full-time realtor? "She’s upfront and straightforward and that style has worked very well for her," says Harrison’s boss, Downing-Frye vice president and general manager Mike Hughes. "She listens to her clients’ needs, but she also tells them what she thinks rather than what she thinks they want to hear."

Back at her open house on Greentree Drive, Harrison makes a mental catalog of cosmetic touches that could freshen up the 15-year-old house. In this tough market, sellers can benefit from simple face-lifts such as painting the walls a soft color rather than sterile white, changing white appliances to stainless steel, and adding decorative molding around the ceilings. A few thousand dollars in improvements can be a seller’s best investment, she says.

Shortly before 2 p.m., visitors start to show up to see this 3,164-square-foot home and its backyard view of the Pelican Bay golf course. It was listed for $2.5 million in October 2005, and has since come down to $1.85 million. As potential customers start trickling in, Harrison is ready. She greets each one with a warm smile and hands them a brochure describing the home. The parade of visitors includes the usual open-house mélange of tire-kickers, curiosity seekers and dreamers. There is a woman scouting for her 83-year-old parents; an attorney from Washington who calls open houses his "Sunday-afternoon occupation"; and an art collector who says, "This house has too many windows. I need walls." The most serious of the prospects is a young couple making their third visit to this house, even though they know they have to sell their condo before they consider buying anything else. With an increasing oversupply of condos on the market, that won’t be easy, and it probably would mean taking a loss. An hour later, Harrison sees a familiar face at the door.

Flip This House

Bob Forehand is what is known in polite real estate society as a short-term investor, and in less genteel circles, as a "flipper." He’s been cruising open houses almost from the time he moved to Naples in 2000, equipped with few firm plans and even less money. A self-proclaimed failure in the stock market at age 50—"I made some poor decisions and lost 80 percent of my wealth, lost $970,000"—Forehand says he now has recouped his losses through quick, in-and-out real estate investments.

"Up until this year, I would go out on Sundays and find my properties," Forehand says. "Then I would call my agent and say, ‘We need to write a contract, like right now,’" His agent on five of those deals was Vicky Harrison. "But today I’m being very careful in this market," he says. "Things are definitely coming down. It’s not unusual right now for properties to be sold at 20 percent under the list price. But after all, we’ve been making 40 percent gains the last couple of years, so I think it is time we do back up a little bit."

While industry experts say that short-term investors fueled the unprecedented hike in prices and bear some responsibility for current market conditions, Forehand is unrepentant. "If I see a steal, I’m going to buy it," he says. "This has become my new vocation."

Haves and Have Nots

Toward the end of the afternoon, Harrison calls the assistants who are hosting her three other open houses. The news she gets from everyone is encouraging and matches the traffic she has seen at her own venue. "This has been a good day," she says. "A lot of people seem interested and are really, really looking." But she turns a bit wistful when she realizes she still may not have found the buyer for this house on Greentree. The furniture is gone and the owners are now in an assisted-living facility. "I really feel badly for them," she says, "because they need to sell by the end of the year, if they can."

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the Greentree Drive owners is John Garippa. An attorney from New Jersey, he is content to wait out the downturn by holding onto his Pelican Bay house—listed at $2.35 million—despite having moved into a Port Royal home in July. Garippa, who has owned property in Naples since 1982, has two distinct advantages over many property sellers in the area today: the financial means to support two high-end homes, and as deep an understanding of property values as anyone in the nation. Garippa is the senior partner of the law firm Garippa Lutz & Giannuario, which specializes in appealing real estate tax valuations for a Who’s Who of Fortune 500 companies. "We’re very much up to speed on how property should be valued," he says.

"At the end of six months, if the Pelican Bay house hasn’t sold, I’m going to take it off the market, and if I have to sit here and hold this house for a couple of years, I’ll do that," says Garippa. "I’m not going to lower the price substantially because, number one, I don’t have to and, number two, because I recognize that this is a typical, normal business cycle."

Harrison confirms that "the people with money are buying, and Port Royal is having one of its best years." But she also knows that many of her clients are not in Garippa’s position. She tells most of her customers that they should avoid owning two places unless they can really afford to ride out the market. "I don’t like it when people are under pressure," she says. "I always tell people, consider the worst-case scenario, even in the best of markets."

Eyes on the Prize

Harrison leaves the Greentree home at 4 p.m., but her day isn’t over. She’s taking a couple she has just met to see another of her listings in the neighborhood. Then she will be on the phone at home until 7, updating other clients on the weekend’s activity. And the rest of the week will mimic the pace of her weekend: up at dawn checking e-mail; answering dozens of phone messages; preparing marketing materials; taking clients to see listings; hosting showings at her listings for other agents and their clients; and calling in plumbers and electricians and handymen to spruce up her listings. Evenings are spent at home with the family, but making plans for the next day can still keep her awake until well after midnight.

Will all this labor pay off in sales in a "down" market? Eventually it will, says Downing-Frye’s Hughes. "The reality is we’ve still done 2,500 transactions this year. It’s not like nothing is selling," he says. "You have to realize that 2005 was such a crazy year that it defied all logic. It was nirvana. A year like that comes along every 50 years.

"You’ve got a huge baby-boomer population that’s going to be coming south. We know they’re coming," Hughes continues, befitting his role as Downing-Frye’s head cheerleader. "They may hold off for a year. But if I’m up there scraping my windshield, paying heating bills, at some point I’m going to say, ‘I’m not going to wait forever.’"

Hughes says he feels the next 10 years will be the "golden years" in Gulfshore real estate. "If you think about all the things that make Naples desirable, they’re all still here," he says. "This is a very unique pocket of the country that in my mind is similar to Vail, Aspen or Scottsdale."

Three weeks after her Greentree open house, Harrison pulls up to another of her listings in Pelican Bay. But this one is no longer on the market. It falls into the category of a realtor’s favorite four-letter word: sold. Vicky had successfully matched up a couple, who had been looking for four years, with another couple, who needed to move back North for health reasons. The sellers had said "$1,595,000" and the buyers had offered $1.1 million. The two parties had met close to the middle at $1.35 million and a deal was done ... almost. There still had been the matter of getting the house up to hurricane code with the proper shutters so that the new owners could obtain insurance.

But now it is 2 p.m. on the day before the closing. In an hour the new owners will be there for the all-important final run-through. Harrison walks up to the front door, opens it and, to her utter horror, is greeted by a realtor’s least favorite four-letter word: mess. The movers had just left an hour before and had churned up a filthy and disheveled house in their wake. And now an experienced realtor’s gut instincts take over. Harrison picks up the phone, calls the new owners and says, "Make it four instead of three. You don’t want to come now. Bye." Then she calls her son, Timmy, and her cleaning lady and commands them to "come over, NOW."

During the next hour and a half, the three of them sweep, vacuum, dust and scrub. It is finally beginning to look presentable and the cleaning lady walks into the bathroom. There she finds one of Naples’ leading realtors down on her knees, wiping out the toilet.

"And I always thought you had a glamorous job," says the cleaning lady.