by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
Watson Realty is expanding its horizons by getting into new homes management.
In an effort to combine the new home site sales and general real estate sales, a New Homes Division was started in January and is being led by Norm Zoberman.
“All too long, there have been two divisions in real estate,” said Zoberman. “There has been general real estate and new home sales salespeople. They are dealing with the same people and the same product and yet they have been at odds for years.”
In the past, he has tried to marry the two and will now do it again at Watson. He plans to grow the division to as big as it can get.
“Watson Realty is in a prime position,” he said. “They have the financing and the people. There are enough people to support this for the small sites, big sites as well as the buyers and sellers. I think this is a great opportunity for Watson Realty.”
Zoberman feels there is a great need for general real estate companies to be involved in both ends of real estate sales.
“The reason is that on a national average 70 percent of all people that walk into a new home sales office send a message that they cannot or will not purchase a home until the old one is sold,” he said.
With Zoberman’s concept, if the two sides are combined, then when the new home sales agent has a prospect that needs their old home sold, they can help them do that with another agent in the same company.
“They feed off of each other,” he said. “With one operation, you have some choices to make.”
Zoberman is in the process of getting contracts with developers and builders to market their new communities or homes.
He will put a team of Realtor agents in their development to market the product and help with any re-sale issues.
Sometimes he will hire site agents to staff the development and other times he will use existing Watson agents, depending on the size of the project.
“It will be a full-time position,” he said. “Builders and developers will come in who need to hire the expertise of a management company to handle the whole sales and marketing project from beginning to end.”
Why would builders and developers who already have site agents have a need for this new division?
They probably wouldn’t, but new builders and developers coming into Jacksonville would.
“They don’t have anything already set up,” he said. “We can take care of the project from start to finish.”
Zoberman’s history is long and involved.
After a career in Canada as a an auctioneer who liquidated bankruptcy merchandise, Zoberman decided to get into real estate when he moved to Florida in 1978.
“I had my house in Canada listed for six months and it didn’t sell,” he said. “I told my wife that I was going back to Canada to sell the house. I told her I’d be back in a month with the house sold and closed. I did that and was back in three weeks. I said to myself, ‘You know what? You’re in the wrong business!’”
He knew of a real estate company, P.M.A. [Positive Mental Attitude] Realty, that had offices in Homestead and in Canada. He got his real estate license, contacted the broker and got a job at the Homestead office in 1979. The job was to manage the Villages of Homestead, which he did for five years. In addition to managing the community, he was asked to fix existing problems in the development.
“I traveled 70 miles door-to-door to Homestead and I fixed the problem as I learned the business,” said Zoberman. “A lot of it was plain common sense through my previous experience with buying and selling and wheeling and dealing.”
The company he worked for had another community, Boca Pointe in Boca Raton, which was in trouble and he was asked to help fix that problem as well.
“When I got to Boca Pointe, there was one builder who had absconded with 70 deposits,” said Zoberman. “He left town and I had 70 homeowners ready to kill whoever was going to sit in my position.”
He faced problems with the site agents and the other builders as well as the homeowners.
He fixed the homeowner problem by working with the developer who decided to pay the homeowners their losses if Zoberman could sell the lots to another builder. He did. He also took a major interest in the sales agents and made them feel appreciated which led to an increase of sales.
“I figured that if I could get the Realtors paid quicker, than I thought I could win their support,” he said. “I could thank them for the business that they were doing, even if they weren’t doing any, and treat them like real people.”
He then was contacted by Corepoint Corporation, which asked him to help them with The Town of Wellington near West Palm Beach.
He fixed the problems with that community and doubled their business. In addition, he had also created two successful general real estate offices under the same company.
He eventually discovered that the development had more problems than he could fix, so he left and moved to West Palm Beach to work for the PGA National Realty Company at the PGA National Golf and Country Club.
There he ran a general real estate sales operation and a site sales operation. He said he was promised profit sharing incentives that never came through, so he left to join Avatar Holding and oversaw Harbor Islands in Hollywood.
“It was my first start-up community,” he said. “I was there for two years and all of a sudden I got sick. In a matter of two weeks, I couldn’t walk at all.”
Zoberman was told he would never walk again.
“I was in pain and agony and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong,” he said.
He and his wife moved to Jacksonville in 2000, so they could be close to her mother and two of their children.
His daughter had a friend who knew a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, so Zoberman went to see him.
The doctor told him that his pain came from his hips deteriorating from previous medicine he had taken.
Ten years earlier, he ate something on vacation and it poisoned him. He was on heavy doses of Prednisone to get rid of the disease. The doctor told him that it deteriorates the body and the x-rays showed that his hips were “like mush.”
After treatment and surgery, he now runs every day and his health has returned.
“I couldn’t stand sitting home all day doing nothing,” he said.
Zoberman sent his resume out and Watson Realty just happened to be starting the new division and a match was made.
“It’s a different aspect of what I was doing,” said Zoberman. “Before I was hired to do the job, and now I’m hired to look for the job.”