by Fred Seely
Editorial Director
It’s Academy Awards time for North Florida’s construction and real estate communities and they’ll take over the Florida Theatre on Friday for the annual celebration.
Called the Laurel Awards, the competition culminations a year of competition for excellence in sales and marketing of homes in the area. Winners get to trumpet their victories to potential buyers; losers get to wait ‘til next year.
About 70 awards will be given for 2004 work and real estate agents who have sold over $1 million also will hear their names called at the black tie event.
It’s all put together by the Sales and Marketing Council, part of the Northeast Florida Builders Association, and about 700 are expected downtown for a pre-event party in the Jesse Smith Park across from the theatre, the awards and then a late-evening party, to follow.
The awards range from recognizing outstanding individuals in categories such as Builder of the Year and Realtor of the Year to accomplishment awards such as Best Brochure, Best Website and Best Ad Campaign.
This year’s theme is “Renaissance Moderna,” noting a period of vigorous artistic and architectural activity.
“It’s actually Jacksonville’s Renaissance and how the area is going through a phase of rebirth and growth that is really unprecedented,” said Mark Berman, chair of the event and president of GarageTek. “We are really trying to celebrate that growth and rebirth.”
Berman said there are many surprises for those who attend the event.
“There will be a lot of entertainment to tie it back to this Renaissance-themed concept,” he said.
Since Berman was also the chair of last year’s event, he has some expectations to meet.
“The expectation for every chair is to outdo the last year’s chair,” he said. “My problem is that I have to outdo me. Last year was easy because it was the 10th anniversary. It was easy to associate it with the diamond anniversary.”
Berman and his committee came up with a Hollywood diamond theme and the presentations included celebrity impersonators.
“An 11th anniversary is frankly not a real big one, it’s pretty dull. I think it’s a lump of coal or something. So, we really had to struggle to come up with an appropriate theme and at the same time, try to outdo last year. So that is why we really wanted to celebrate Jacksonville’s Renaissance,” he said.
Started in 1994, the awards have been a rather pedestrian event until last year when Berman took over. A former marketer for the World Golf Village who bought the GarageTek franchise here, he decided to add pizzazz.
New this year is the reception in Jesse Smith Park which starts at 6. He says this year’s awards presentation will have more glitz and that the after-party will be bigger.
“Last year was the first for the after-party upstairs and we kind of did it softly,” he said. “This year, we have sponsors for it and expect a pretty good crowd. That will be the dessert.”
Berman said the expectation from a numbers standpoint is in place.
“We have higher sponsorships than we had last year,” he said. “We had more entries than we’ve ever had. Hopefully, that translates to a similar jump in
crowd size.”