by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Like most real estate analysts, Ray Rodriguez uses advanced computer models and statistical breakdowns to predict the market’s ebbs and flows. But when Rodriguez wants to dig below the surface of those statistics, he lets his fingers do the walking.
Rodriguez is the president of the Real Estate Strategy of North Florida, and the secret to his intimate grasp of the Duval County market lies not on a computer disk but inside an unruly stack of papers scattered across his desk. The stack contains hundreds of deeds filed in the previous weeks with the County for residential and commercial transactions.
Each year Rodriguez thumbs through every deed filed, usually about 40,000 of them. Reading the deeds in person tells Rodriguez more than what properties have sold. They tell him who’s buying and for how much.
“I’ll tell you something you probably didn’t know,” said Rodriguez. “The townhomes that are selling in Mandarin; 40 percent of the buyers are women. How do I know that? Because I went through the documents and saw their names.”
While there’s no shortage of real estate research available on the Internet or in trade magazines, Rodriguez said he provides his customers with a local perspective on the market that national research firms can’t match.
“National firms see statistics only. It’s like looking down on the market from a hot air balloon. They’re removed from what’s going on in the streets,” he said. “I’m on the ground. I see the social conditions in combination with sales statistics.”
His perspective is helped by his involvement with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Rodriguez participates in a JSO initiative that takes him to Neighborhood Watch programs around the City lecturing on safety.
The lectures provide Rodriguez with some de facto market research.
“It works both ways for me. I can tell builders, ‘This is the kind of neighborhood these people want,’ and I hear from residents directly what their neighborhoods need to take off,” he said.
Rodriguez received much of his real estate education at the street level. He doesn’t shy away from discussing his lack of college education — something he brings up several times during an hour-long interview. Rodriguez said he received his master’s degree from “the school of hard knocks.” He doubts any college campus could have taught him more about real estate than he learned from his own foray into real estate investment.
Rodriguez waded into the hot Duval County market of the mid-1980s just before the savings and loan scandals a few years later sent the market plummeting and left investors like Rodriguez holding the bag.
Now with a decade of market research to fall back on, Rodriguez is planning another run at investing. But he said his approach this time around will be a bit more conservative. He shakes his head when he looks back at some of the mistakes he made. But he’s thankful for the lessons he learned from his mistakes.
“Like any young knucklehead trying to get into real estate, I went to all the no-money-down seminars and spent thousands on books. They taught me how to buy real estate but not how to keep it. It’s serious business. You have to have a certain attitude; you’re trying to make a buck off of someone else,” he said.
His future investments are likely to include pre-sale deposit investments on luxury condominiums and tax certificates. One potentially lucrative area of the market that no longer interests Rodriguez is the booming foreclosure segment.
Rodriguez remembers his own pain when he lost his investment properties and has no interest in the other side of the equation.
“I know what’s involved in loss. It’s not just property you lose. In a foreclosure you’re losing your credit, your self dignity, maybe your family,” he said. “I’m not the kind of person to make a dollar off another person’s loss.”
But Duval County’s market bounced back and so did Rodriguez. He opened the Strategy Center in 1994 and rode the market’s resurgence to increased revenue each year since.
“I started the business with about a dime in reserve, honestly. Now my revenue is in six figures but it took persistence to get there,” he said.
The Strategy Center’s revenues have almost doubled since the Super Bowl came to town. In the three months after the game left town, the firm earned almost as much as in the previous year, said Rodriguez.
In addition to a healthy balance sheet, the Strategy Center has given Rodriguez the opportunity to work side by side with wife, Maribel, and son, Juan, whose office is across the hall from his dad’s corner suite in 550 Water Street.
Ray calls Maribel, “the best boss I’ve ever had,” and said his marriage is the reason he doesn’t sign contracts with his 40 clients, which include builders like Centex, real estate investors and even the City.
“She’s the only person I want to have a contract with,” he said.
Rodriguez has a less cozy relationship with area realtors. The profession is driven by a sales mentality, he said, that sometimes doesn’t appreciate his blunt appraisal of some of their offerings.
“A realtor might sell 10 homes in a year. I process more than 40,000 transactions. Who do you think understands the market better?” he said. “No disrespect to them, but their job is to sell their properties.If a kettle is black, I’m going to call it black.”